"No, I loved them once."

"Then did something happen to change your love to hate?"

"Nothing. I just withered like the fig tree," Mark replied. He resented talking in this intimate way to Dayrell, but he could not bring himself to be openly rude and he could not answer insincerely. At the same time he was anxious to avoid, if possible, any exchange of confidences. All the months he had been at St. Cyprian's he had felt that Dayrell was wanting to confide in him, and he dreaded above everything any kind of unofficial confession that would involve him in a discussion of Dayrell's private life.

"Strange," Dayrell said. "Of course, I'm still as fond of people as ever I was. Really in some ways too fond. It's curious how easily I am affected by..." Mark looked at his watch.

"I say, Dayrell, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I promised Stewart that I would say Evening Prayer for him. He's attending some fashionable rout or other." With which Mark hurried away to church.

Soon after this conversation with Dayrell there was one of those periodic agitations for the relaxation of the divorce laws, which occupied all the clergy of St. Cyprian's in their various activities.

Mark took the line that it did not matter how much the secular authority loosened the bonds of holy matrimony, provided that the Church did not abandon her own attitude towards divorce.

"If we use up all our own energy in trying to prevent this Bill being made law, and do not succeed in the end, we shall only remain in the public mind as a set of unfeeling bigots. If on the other hand we make no opposition, but take the much stronger and much safer line of refusing to re-marry divorced persons, we are in an impregnable position, because, after all, people who wish to avail themselves of the respectability that marriage in church confers will hardly have the impudence to claim that the Church has no right to make her own rules for her own children."

The others, however, thought that the Bill should be

opposed politically, reserving the action of the Church as a last effort to protect the sanctity and inviolableness of Holy Matrimony. They considered that by nothing stronger than passive resistance the Church would expose herself to the criticism of the laity, who might claim that they had been lulled into a false security. The controversy was carried on fiercely in the Press, and the usual hard cases were produced of women tied to murderers, lunatics, drunkards, and that bugbear the genial and humane adulterer who would not throw plates at his wife, and whom therefore she could not divorce.

"What annoys me in all these arguments about marriage," Mark said, "is the assumption that there is a sufficient number of wretched women tied for life to fiends to warrant a change in the divorce law, while all the rest are happy and suitably married. My experience leads me to suppose that from the sacramental standpoint of marriage most people are unhappy and unsuitably married, because when they married they did not regard Holy Matrimony as a sacrament. Respectability has been substituted for holiness. People go to communion in the same way. Confirmation is another piece of respectability on a par with the London Matriculation or the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate. Penance holds its own as a sacrament, because people who use it use it as a sacrament, and those who don't use it think that it is definitely not respectable, in fact that it is positively improper."

"And how are you going to secure that people enter Holy Matrimony with a comprehension of it as a sacrament?" one of Mark's colleagues asked.

She That's enough.

"You can't, of course; any more than you could be sure that every communicant is in a fit state to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. But that is the point I'm trying to make about the attitude of the Church. says that marriage is a sacrament: It's no good asking the law to step in and protest its sacramental quality. You might as well ask the law to put Holy Baptism in the same category as vaccination. The law might abolish marriage to-morrow. In fact I rather wish it would. We should know where we were

then, and we shouldn't be pestered with the woes of people who wish to evade their obligations. I can understand and sympathize with a man or a woman who says, all for love and the world, even the world to come, well lost. But I do hate these respectable sentimentalists who want to be re-married in a church. Of course, as usual in the Establishment, the bishops are the cause of half the mischief. They go puffing down to the House of Lords to vote against a second reading of the Bill, but if it should pass and become law they would wash their hands of it like the Pontius Pilates that they are. It is to be left to the conscience of the individual priest to obey either the law or Jesus Christ. But not one of them will proceed against the individual priest that obeys the law in preference to Jesus Christ."

"No proceedings are provided for," the Vicar pointed out. “And I think you are exaggerating the cowardice of the bishops. The Bishop of Silchester is taking a very strong line with his clergy. So is the Bishop of Leominster, and so is the Bishop of Cambridge.”

Mark used to get annoyed with himself for taking part in these discussions, which never seemed to lead to anything practical. It was like that serious review. Nothing had happened. The review had never appeared. It was like the Society of St. Anselm, which was to publish a new series of tracts for the times. Nothing had happened, or at any rate nothing that had had the least effect outside of quires and places where they sing.

The fact was that he had been wrong to accept a curacy at St. Cyprian's. He should have gone back to a poor parish. The rich might require missionary attention, but he was not the missioner to give it. He took no interest in their souls, and their sins he abominated, for they seemed to be the appurtenances of wealth, in the same category as footmen and elaborate dressingcases and horrid little Pekinese spaniels with faces like penwipers. In spite of Drogo Mortemer, the AngloCatholicism of St. Cyprian's had not yet become a really fashionable craze like auction bridge or fox-trotting, and it did not look as if it ever would be; but it looked equally remote from ever being a faintly comparable influence to

that of the Jesuits of Farm Street or the Oratorians of Brompton Road.

That old Spanish confessional box began to get badly on Mark's nerves. It became a haunted thing, so that from the heart of every oaken rose and pomegranate, from every cluster of acanthus and vine peered the demoniac visage of a deadly sin. There were moments at dusk when the interior was hung with heavy curtains of purple velvet, and when by some monstrous outrage on the imagination it turned into an ancient four-post bed, in the hangings of which even the ivory crucifix had at once a repulsive and a sensuous cachexy like a faded tuberose. At such moments the wood seemed to drip with hysterical tears and the air to reek with the subtly self-indulgent and lying and perfumed breath of feminality. At such times Mark could have set a torch to the old confessional box until he saw it crackling in the flames of the chaste and furious fire and all its hoarded memories being utterly consumed. Oppressed by the phantasies that daily grew more potent, he used to project his spirit into a polar waste, a moon-cold desert where the sun would hang iike a lump of frozen honey, lighting nothing, and where even human lust would congeal and die. But he would scarcely have opened his mouth to breathe deep into his lungs the thought of such sublime cold, when he would lose the glittering blue and green ice-peaks and find himself back in this haunted confessional with the perfume of stale incense and burnt wax in his nostrils and with a woman's heavy white face languishing upon the grille like Lilith, foul offspring of the serpent's embrace. It was surely in some such revolt of masculinity that the lamia was imagined. Mark would have preferred a temptation of the flesh rather than this temptation to abhor the flesh, which reached such a pitch that he was filled with a horror of all created life and hoped for annihilation. He sought out Mortemer.

"Vicar, I'm afraid I shall have to resign. The fact is that I cannot stand any more of this intensive work in the box. It is giving me a loathing of everything that is alive. I'm afraid that my nerves have got the better of me. I ought to have spoken to you before,

but you can understand that I was ashamed to admit myself beaten before I had struggled hard. I really cannot bear another confession. It even affects my reading. I picked up Anna Karenina the other day, which I once read with the greatest admiration and enjoyment; but I had to fling it down, for the effect on me was of being smothered to death in a woman's wardrobe. I found it so nauseating that the very paper pages seemed slimy to the touch. I feel that there is nothing fit to read except the Binomial Theorem, nothing fit to listen to except Bach's fugues, and nowhere fit to live except in a rest-house on one of the higher Alps."

"You ought not to have gone on so long as you have," the Vicar said. “And I think you ought to leave London as soon as you can."

"Or else return to a poor parish," Mark said. "I want to live with the poor and the humble. I long for some honest dirt and some real squalor, something that could, at any rate, be cleaned away by a dustman, not like the dirt of the soul and the squalor of the mind that one gets here. I really cannot stand the refinements of civilization any longer. The poor may behave like monkeys, but that's better than behaving like performing monkeys, which these people do. No doubt Dayrell would have a name for the particular mania that obsesses me to escape from the insincerity and affectation and mimicry and worship of riches, rank and show which is the outward visible sign of our inward spiritual corruption. When I first came to St. Cyprian's you used to encourage me to denounce the whole business from the pulpit. But what effect had it? None whatever. It only made me appear as big a mountebank as any of them, and you very rightly stopped it. But I am no more effectual in the confessional. At any rate, apart from my priestly power of absolution, I've lost any effectiveness I may have possessed at the beginning. I know that I am sinning against hope in talking like this, but not once since I have been here has Almighty God blessed my eyes with the sight of His salvation. I recognize the egoism of that remark; but that is how I stand, immensely conscious of my egoism, yet as utterly incapable as a man clinging