. I don't see that there's really a contradiction
in it at all. I'm in love with you, all my heart's in love with you,
what's the good of being shy about it? I'd just die for your littlest
wish right here now, it's just as though I'd got love in my veins
instead of blood, but that's not taking me away from that other thing.
It's bringing me round to that other thing. I feel as if without you I
wasn't up to anything at all, but _with_ you--We'd not go settling down
in a cottage or just touring about with a Baedeker Guide or anything of
that kind. Not for long anyhow. We'd naturally settle down side by side
and _do_ ..."

"But what should we do?" asked Cecily.

There came a hiatus in their talk.

Mr. Direck took a deep breath.

"You see that old felled tree there. I was sitting on it the day before
yesterday and thinking of you. Will you come there and sit with me on
it? When you sit on it you get a view, oh! a perfectly lovely English
view, just a bit of the house and those clumps of trees and the valley
away there with the lily pond. I'd love to have you in my memory of
it...."

They sat down, and Mr. Direck opened his case. He was shy and clumsy
about opening it, because he had been thinking dreadfully hard about it,
and he hated to seem heavy or profound or anything but artless and
spontaneous to Cecily. And he felt even when he did open his case that
the effect of it was platitudinous and disappointing. Yet when he had
thought it out it had seemed very profound and altogether living.

"You see one doesn't want to use terms that have been used in a thousand
different senses in any way that isn't a perfectly unambiguous sense,
and at the same time one doesn't want to seem to be canting about things
or pitching anything a note or two higher than it ought legitimately to
go, but it seems to me that this sort of something that Mr. Britling is
always asking for in his essays and writings and things, and what you
are looking for just as much and which seems so important to you that
even love itself is a secondary kind of thing until you can square the
two together, is nothing more nor less than Religion--I don't mean this
Religion or that Religion but just Religion itself, a Big, Solemn,
Comprehensive Idea that holds you and me and all the world together in
one great, grand universal scheme. And though it isn't quite the sort of
idea of love-making that's been popular--well, in places like
Carrierville--for some time