"What did you think of the service?" she asked presently. By this time she and Wyndham were walking together a little in advance of the others. "I didn't hear it. I was watching Flaxman Reed all the time." This statement, as Audrey well knew, was not strictly correct. "So was I. My uncle says if he stays in the church he'll be the coming man." "The coming man? H'm. He's been going back ever since I knew him. At present he's got to the thirteenth century; he may arrive at the Nicene age, but he'll never have a hold on his own. He's nothing but a holy anachronism." "Oh? I thought you didn't understand him?" "In one way I do, in another I don't. You see I knew him at Oxford when I was a happy undergraduate." (Audrey could not imagine Langley Wyndham ever being an undergraduate; it seemed to her that he must always have been a Master of Arts.) "I knew the real Flaxman Reed, and he was as logical a sceptic as you or I. There was an epidemic of ideas in our time, and the poor fellow was frightened, so he took it--badly. Of course he made up his mind that he was going to die, and he was horribly afraid of dying. So instead of talking about his interesting symptoms, as you or I might do" ("You or I"--again that flattering association!), "he quietly got rid of the disease by attacking its source." "How?" "Well, I forget the precise treatment, but I think he took equal parts of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, diluted with _aqua sacra_. He gave me the prescription, but I preferred the disease." "At any rate he was in earnest." "Deadly earnest. That's the piety of the fraud." "You surely don't call him a fraud?" "Well--a self-deceiver. Isn't that the completest and most fatal form of fraud? He fights and struggles to be what he isn't and calls it renouncing self." "He renounces the world too--and everything that's pleasant." "I'm afraid that doesn't impress me. I can't forget that he renounced reason because it was unpleasant. Rather than bear a little spiritual neuralgia, he killed the nerve of thought." "How terrible!" said Audrey, though she had no very precise notion of what was involved in that operation. "To us--not to him. Yet he talks about doing good work for his generation." "Why shouldn't he? He works hard enough." "Unfortunately his generation doesn't want his work or him either. It's too irrevocably pledged to reality. There's one thing about him though--his magnificent personality. I believe he has unlimited influence over some men and most women." Audrey ignored the last suggestion. "You seem to find him very interesting." "He is profoundly interesting. Not in himself so much, but in his associations. Do you know, when I saw you in church to-night it struck me that he might possibly influence _you_." "Never! I should have to give up my intellect first, I suppose. I'm not prepared to do _that_." Wyndham smiled again. "Why, what made you think he would influence me?"