strange idea of God who was also a limited person, who could come as
close as Teddy, whispering love in the darkness. She had a ridiculous
feeling that God really struggled like Mr. Britling, and that with only
some indefinable inferiority of outlook Mr. Britling loved like God. She
loved him for his maps and his dreams and the bareness of his talk to
her. It was strange how the straining thought of the dead Teddy had
passed now out of her mind. She was possessed by a sense of ending and
beginning, as though a page had turned over in her life and everything
was new. She had never given religion any thought but contemptuous
thought for some years, since indeed her growing intelligence had
dismissed it as a scheme of inexcusable restraints and empty pretences,
a thing of discords where there were no discords except of its making.
She had been a happy Atheist. She had played in the sunshine, a natural
creature with the completest confidence in the essential goodness of the
world in which she found herself. She had refused all thought of
painful and disagreeable things. Until the bloody paw of war had wiped
out all her assurance. Teddy, the playmate, was over, the love game was
ended for ever; the fresh happy acceptance of life as life; and in the
place of Teddy was the sorrow of life, the pity of life, and this coming
of God out of utter remoteness into a conceivable relation to her own
existence.

She had left Mr. Britling to his atlas. He lay prone under the hedge
with it spread before him. His occupation would have seemed to her only
a little while ago the absurdest imaginable. He was drawing boundaries
on his maps very carefully in red ink, with a fountain pen. But now she
understood.

She knew that those red ink lines of Mr. Britling's might in the end
prove wiser and stronger than the bargains of the diplomats....

In the last hour he had come very near to her. She found herself full of
an unwonted affection for him. She had never troubled her head about her
relations with any one except Teddy before. Now suddenly she seemed to
be opening out to all the world for kindness. This new idea of a
friendly God, who had a struggle of his own, who could be thought of as
kindred to Mr. Britling, as kindred to Teddy--had gripped her
imagination. He was behind the autumnal sunshine; he was in the little
bird that had seemed so confident and friendly. Whatever was kind,
whatever was tender; there was God. And a thousand old ph