And yet, as far back as you could remember, there had been a regular conspiracy to keep you from knowing the truth about God. Even the Encyclopaedia man was in it. He tried to put you off Pantheism. He got into a temper about it and said it was monstrous and pernicious and profoundly false and that the heart of man rose up in revolt against it. He had begun by talking about "attempts to transgress the fixed boundaries which One wiser than we has assigned to our intellectual operations." Perhaps he was a clergyman. Clergymen always put you off like that; so that you couldn't help suspecting that they didn't really know and were afraid you would find them out. They were like poor little frightened Mamma when she wouldn't let you look at the interesting bits beyond the place she had marked in your French Reader. And they were always apologising for their God, as if they felt that there was something wrong with him and that he was not quite real. But to the pantheists the real God was so intensely real that, compared with him, being alive was not quite real, it was more like dreaming. Another thing: the pantheists--the Hindu ones and the Greeks, and Baruch Spinoza--were heathen, and the Christians had tried to make you believe that the heathen went to hell because they didn't know the truth about God. You had been told one lie on the top of another. And all the time the truth was there, in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. Who would have thought that the Encyclopaedia could have been so exciting? The big puce-coloured books stood in a long row in the bottom shelf behind her father's chair. Her heart thumped when she gripped the volumes that contained the forbidden knowledge of the universe. The rough morocco covers went Rr-rr-rimp, as they scraped together; and there was the sharp thud as they fell back into their place when she had done with them. These sounds thrilled her with a secret joy. When she was away from the books she liked to think of them standing there on the hidden shelf, waiting for her. The pages of "Pantheism" and "Spinoza" were white and clean, and she had noticed how they had stuck together. Nobody had opened them. She was the first, the only one who knew and cared. III.