“If you walk into my front door as a distinguished visitor I am happy to show you the place.  You can prowl about the garden, poke your nose into the pantry and learn, if it amuses you, all about my private life.  But if you rent a high attic overlooking my premises and stair out of your window all day long, watching my movements and noting down everything I do, why, damn it, I call that vulgar.  Staring is bad form.  Vertical gods are inquisitive.  I don’t like to be supervised.  I don’t care about this dossier business.  My garden is for you and me to walk about in, not for outsiders to stare into.  Which reminds me that you have not been to see me lately.  You ought to come and look at my cannas; you really ought!  They are in magnificent bloom just now.  When shall it be?”

Mr. Keith seemed to be already tired of the subject.  In fact he was as near being bored as ever he allowed himself to be.  But the other refused to let the conversation be side-tracked.  He wanted to know.

“Vertical and horizontal gods. . . .  Dear me.  Sounds rather profane.”

“I have not heard that word for quite a long time.”

“You don’t feel the need of any kind of superior being to control human affairs?”

“Not up to the present.  I can find no room in my Cosmos for a deity, save as a waste product of human weakness, an excrement of the imagination.  If you gave me the sauciest god that ever sat on a cloud or breakfasted with the Village Idiot—­’pon my word, I shouldn’t know what to do with him.  I don’t collect bric-a-brac myself, and the British Museum is dreadfully overstocked.  Perhaps the Duchess could make some use of him, if he specialized in lace vestments and choral mass.  By the way, I hear that she is going to be admitted into the Roman Church next week; there is to be a luncheon after the ceremony.  Are you going?”

“Vertical and horizontal gods. . . .  I never heard that distinction made before.”

“It is a difference, my dear Heard.  Mankind remains in direct contact with the downstairs variety.  That simplifies matters.  But the peculiar position of those others—­perpendicularly overhead at a vast distance—­necessitates a troublesome code of verbal signals, unintelligible to common folk, for the expression of mutual desires.  You cannot have any god of this kind without some such cumbrous contrivance to bridge over the gulf and make communication possible.  It is called theology.  It complicates life very considerably.  Yes,” he pursued, “the vertical-god system is not only vulgar; it is perplexing and expensive.  Think of the wastage, of the myriads of people who have been sacrificed because they misinterpreted some enigmatical word in the code.  Why are you intent on these conundrums?”

“Well, partly at least, it’s quite a practical matter.  You know that American millionaire, van Koppen, and the scandal attached to his peculiar habits?  It made me wonder, only yesterday—­”