ht home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund's
impossibility. He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an
explanation of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a
storm of extravagantly perplexing emotions....

She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the
plans to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis
picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid
pink. On a golden table by the window a number of recently bought books
were lying, and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after
another. The first was "The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,"
that bearder of lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of
Wesleyan chaplains. For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of
this inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet
and then turned to the next volume. This was a life of Saint Teresa,
that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries. The third dealt with
Madame Guyon. It was difficult not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was
reading for a part.

She entered.

She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high
waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk,
and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and
green. Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing
paper. "I'm so pleased," she said. "It's 'eady at last and I can show
you."

She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid
black and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing
paper from the floor.

"It's the Temple," she panted in a significant whisper. "It's the Temple
of the One T'ue God!"

She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange
square building to his startled eyes. "Iszi't it just pe'fect?" she
demanded.

He took the drawing from her. It represented a building, manifestly an
enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers
flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between
the towers appeared a dome. It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had
produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of
Wells. Its enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large
automobiles that were driving away in the foreground after "setting
down." "Here is the plan," she said, thrusting another sheet upon him
before he could fu