She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.

She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the “Ussian Ballet” and the works of Mousso’gski and “Imsky Ko’zakof.”

The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski’s music, but failed to see the “significance “—­of many of the costumes.

(2)

It was on a Sunday night—­the fourth Sunday after Easter—­that the supreme crisis of the bishop’s life began.  He had had a feeling all day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his ceremonies absurd and undignified.  In the night he became bleakly and painfully awake.  His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the tortuousness and weakness of his own character.  Every day he perceived that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became more mountainous.  And every day he procrastinated.  If he had told her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London—­before anything material intervened—­everything would have been different, everything would have been simpler....

He groaned and rolled over in his bed.

There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery.  For he saw that amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God.  The last month became incredible.  He had seen God.  He had touched God’s hand.  God had been given to him, and he had neglected the gift.  He was still lost amidst the darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian world.  For a month now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly delay, and the fetters of association and usage and minor interests were as unbroken as they had been before ever the vision shone.  Was it credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and instinct as his?  We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks and leaves us where we were.

“Louse that I am!” he cried.

He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light that had for a moment touched him.  But what had he to do with God, he, the loiterer, the little thing?

He was little, he was funny.  His prevarications with his wife, for example, were comic.  There was no other word for him but “funny.”

He rolled back again and lay staring.