me. I think I saw God."

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to
hit him.

"I think I saw God," he repeated more firmly. "I had a sudden
realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid
and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was
seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve
him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and
self-love and secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to
get back to that. I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament
an easy-going man. I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my
larger purposes, and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The
drug was a good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help
again."

"I know no more than you do what it was."

"Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect?
If for example I tried morphia in some form?"

"You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you took small
quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But
the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you,
moral decay--rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become
hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am
talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell
you that."

"I had an idea. I had a hope...."

"You've a stiff enough fight before you," said the doctor, "without such
a handicap as that."

"You won't help me?"

The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself
with an extended hand and waggling fingers.

"I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I would
I couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal brews,
no doubt. Something--accidental. It's lost--for good--for your good,
anyhow...."

(2)

Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He
hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.

"That door closes," he said. "There's no getting back that way."...

He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and
Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course
for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.

(3)

At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the
crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear
bef