because two people were unhappy instead of four?"

"They wanted a child as a go-between!" said Barthrop.

"Of course they did!" said Father Payne. "That would have pulled the whole
ménage together. And don't tell me that it was a wise dispensation that
they were childless! Cleansing fires? The fires in which they lived, with
Carlyle raging about porridge and milk and crowing cocks, working alone,
walking alone, flying off to see Lady Ashburton, sleeping alone; and Mrs.
Carlyle, whom everyone else admired and adored, eating her heart out
because she could not get him to value her company;--there was not much
that was cleansing about all that! The cleansing came when she was dead,
and when he saw what he had done."

"I expect they have made it up by now," said Kaye.

"You're quite right!" said Father Payne. "It matters less with those great
vivid people. They can afford to remember. But the little people, who
simply end further back than they began, what is to be done for them?"



XVII

OF LOVING GOD


Father Payne suddenly said to me once in a loud voice, after a long
silence--we were walking together--"Writers, preachers, moralists,
sentimentalists, are much to blame for not explaining more what they mean