he added with a sigh.

"Well, really, do you know," said Mark, "I don't regret that. Whatever
may be the advantages of a public school and university, the education
hampers one. One becomes identified with a class; and when one has
finished with that education, the next two or three years have to be
spent in discovering that public school and university men form a very
small proportion of the world's population. Sometimes I almost regret
that my mother did not let me acquire that Cockney accent. You can say a
lot of things in a Cockney accent which said without any accent sound
priggish. You must admit, Rector, that your inner comment on my tale of
the gospellers and the innkeeper is 'Dear me! I am afraid Mark's turning
into a prig.'"

"No, no. I laid particular stress on the point that if I didn't know you
as well as I do I might perhaps have thought that," the Rector
protested.

"I don't think I am a prig," Mark went on slowly. "I don't think I have
enough confidence in myself to be a prig. I think the way I argued with
Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie was a bit priggish, because at the back of
my head all the time I was talking I felt in addition to the arrogance
of faith a kind of confounded snobbishness; and this sense of
superiority came not from my being a member of the Church, but from
feeling myself more civilized than they were. Looking back now at the
conversation, I can remember that actually at the very moment I was
talking of the Holy Ghost I was noticing how Mr. Bullock's dicky would
keep escaping from his waistcoat. I wonder if the great missionary
saints of the middle ages had to contend with this accumulation of
social conventions with which we are faced nowadays. It seems to me
that in everything--in art, in religion, in mere ordinary everyday life
and living--man is adding daily to the wall that separates him from
God."

"H'm, yes," said the Rector, "all this only means that you are growing
up. The child is nearer to God than the man. Wordsworth said it better
than I can say it. Similarly, the human race must grow away from God as
it takes upon itself the burden of knowledge. That surely is inherent in
the fall of man. No philosopher has yet improved upon the first chapter
of Genesis as a symbolical explanation of humanity's plight. When man
was created--or if you like to put it evolved--there must have been an
exact moment at which he had the chance of remaining where he was--in
other words, in the