-a decadent who would
rather die with his day than live an hour behind it--who can't see that
the future may have more kindred with the past than with the present.
Mind you, I'm not talking of him, but of his school."

"Then you read him? Of course--everybody reads him."

"I've not much time for any reading that lies outside my work. But I
read his first book when it came out. Is it from him you get what you
call your heterodoxy?"

"No. You have to think these things out for yourself."

Audrey was led into making this statement simply by the desire to
please. That eternally feminine instinct told her that at the moment she
would be most interesting to Flaxman Reed in the character of a forlorn
sceptic. His face sharpened with a sudden distrust.

"What, have _you_ got the malady of the century--the disease of thought?
Surely this is something new?"

"It is. One can't go on for ever in the old grooves. One must think."

"Yes; that curse is laid upon us for our sins."

Audrey smiled a bitter smile, as much as to say that she must have
committed some awful crime to be so tormented with intellect as she was.

"I suppose," he continued guilelessly, "every earnest mind must go
through this sooner or later."

"Yes, but I've come out on what you call the other side. I can't go
back, can I?"

"No; but you can go round."

Audrey shook her head sadly, feeling all the time how nice it was to be
taken seriously.

"Why not? Why not compromise? What is life but compromise? What else is
my own position as an Anglican priest? I daresay you know that my heart
is not altogether with the Church I serve?" He checked himself; he had
not meant to strike this personal note. And how could he explain the
yearning of his heart for the great heart of the Mother-church? This
would have been possible last year at Oxford, but not now. "I tell you
this because I feel that it might perhaps help you."

"No; I know what you will say next. You will tell me to stop thinking
because it hurts me."

"I won't. You will go on thinking in spite of me. But your intellect
will be feeding on itself. You will get no farther. Thought can never be
satisfied with thought."

Flaxman Reed was only a simple pure-minded priest, but Wyndham himself
could not have chosen words more subtly calculated to establish the
"influence." To have two such champions battling for possession of her
soul was exciting enough in all conscience, but she was inexpressibly