Godfrey was fond of poetry; it bored Isobel. His tendencies were
towards religion though of a very different type from that preached
and practised by his father; hers were anti-religious. In fact she
would have been inclined to endorse the saying of that other
schoolgirl who defined faith as "the art of believing those things
which we know to be untrue," while to him on the other hand they were
profoundly true, though often enough not in the way that they are
generally accepted. Had he possessed any powers of definition at that
age, probably he would have described our accepted beliefs as shadows
of the Truth, distorted and fantastically shaped, like those thrown by
changeful, ragged clouds behind which the eternal sun is shining,
shadows that vary in length and character according to the hour and
weather of the mortal day.

Isobel for her part took little heed of shadows. Her clear, scientific
stamp of mind searched for ascertainable facts, and on these she built
up her philosophy of life and of the death that ends it. Of course all
such contradictions may often be found in a single mind which believes
at one time and rejects at another and sees two, or twenty sides of
everything with a painful and bewildering clearness.

Such a character is apt to end in profound dissatisfaction with the
self from which it cannot be free. Much more then would one have
imagined that these two must have been dissatisfied with each other
and sought the opportunities of escape which were open to them. But it
was not so in the least. They argued and contradicted until they had
nothing more to say, and then lapsed into long periods of weary but
good-natured silence. In a sense each completed each by the addition
of its opposite, as the darkness completes the light, thus making the
round of the perfect day.