was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady
Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable
proposition. Why?

Why?

There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of
action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as
he believed in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either
his first or his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous
revelations, exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were
upon different grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave
way; a sword of plaster against a reality of steel.

And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a
God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His
intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living,
breathing--occasionally coughing--reality of Phoebe, God was something
as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....

Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.

By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park
ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his
religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question:
"Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary
lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to
Phoebe plain and clear?" Old Likeman's argument came back to him with
novel and enhanced powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his
own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did
it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned
himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?

"But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false
and wrong," he told himself. "God is something more than a priggish
devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim--he should
have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam,
Daphne, Clementina--all of them.... But he hasn't'!..."

It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that
he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God
that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that
drug that had touched his soul to belief.

Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after
all with a good conscience he might prea