"Oh. Very handsome face." "Very handsome." You could see by Mark's face that he didn't care about Lady Limond. Mamma had turned again to the girl in the white frock who had nursed him. "Are those all, Mark?" "Those are all." She took off her glasses and closed her eyes. Her face was smooth now: her hands were quiet. She had him. She would always have him. But when he went away for a fortnight to stay with the man called St. John, she was miserable till he had come back, safe. IV. Whit Sunday morning. She would walk home with Mark after church while Mamma stayed behind for the Sacrament. But it didn't happen. Mark scowled as he turned out into the aisle to make way for her. He went back into the pew and sat there, looking stiff and stubborn. He would go up with Mamma to the altar rails. He would eat the bread and drink the wine. That afternoon she took her book into the garden. Mark came to her there. Mamma, tired with the long service, dozed in the drawing-room. Mark read over her shoulder: "'Wir haben in der Transcendentalen Aesthetik hinreichend bewiesen.' Do it in English." "'In the Transcendental Aesthetic we have sufficiently proved that all that is perceived in space or time, and with it all objects of any experience possible to us are mere Vorstellungen--Vorstellungen-- ideas--presentations, which, so far as they are presented, whether as extended things or series of changes, have no existence grounded in themselves outside our thoughts--'" "Why have you taken to that dreadful stodge?" "I'm driven to it. It's like drink; once you begin you've got to go on." "What on earth made you begin?" "I wanted to know things--to know what's real and what isn't, and what's at the back of everything, and whether there _is_ anything there or not. And whether you can know it or not. And how you can know anything at all, anyhow. I'd give anything ... Are you listening?" "Yes, Minky, you'd give anything--" "I'd give everything--everything I possess--to know what the Thing-in-itself is." "I'd rather know Arabic. Or how to make a gun that would find its own range and feed itself with bullets sixty to the minute." "That would be only knowing a few; more things. I want _the_ thing. Reality, Substance, the Thing-in-itself. Spinoza calls it God. Kant doesn't; but he seems to think it's all the God you'll ever get, and that, even then, you can't know it. Transcendental Idealism is just another sell." "Supposing," Mark said, "there isn't any God at all." "Then I'd rather know _that_ than go on thinking there was one when there wasn't." "But you'd feel sold?" "Sort of sold. But it's the risk--the risk that makes it so exciting ... Why? Do _you_ think there isn't any God?" "I'm afraid I think there mayn't be." "Oh, Mark--and you went to the Sacrament. You ate it and drank it." "Why shouldn't I?" "You don't believe in it any more than I do." "I never said anything about believing in it." "_You ate and drank it_."