ed the intense decorative activities into which Lady Sunderbund
incontinently plunged. Had he been inclined to remark them he certainly
might have done so, even though a considerable proportion was being
thoughtfully veiled for a time from his eyes.

For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful tie whom
he met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat. This young man
pulled the conversation again and again, Lady Sunderbund aiding and
abetting, in the direction of the "ideal church." It was his ambition,
he said, someday, to build an ideal church, "divorced from tradition."

Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that hitherto
all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation
due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or--as
in the case of the Egyptian temples--to some particular star, and by
sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial
altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other
lines than that. The architect would be so free that--

"Absolutely free," interrupted the young architect. "He might, for
example, build a temple like a star."

"Or like some wondyful casket," said Lady Sunderbund....

And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of
taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about religious music.

Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious people.
He said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity about Moussorgski,
but that the most beautiful single piece of music in the world
was Beethoven's sonata, Opus 111,--he was thinking, he said, more
particularly of the Adagio at the end, molto semplice e cantabile. It
had a real quality of divinity.

The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought,
with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds, that nowadays we
had got a little beyond that anyhow.

"We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or
Beethoven," said Scrope.

Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's disposition
to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among
the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey,
Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena
and so forth, to meet him. Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind
that he was by no means so completely in control of the new depart