CHAPTER IV TRAVELS ON THE CONTINENT Only in travel do we find rest. For our world is a moving platform, and he who would mark time must run—certainly he must run.—DR. DIVES: _Abraham the Pedestrian_. The choice of a profession, which naturally began to exercise me when I had gone down, was not at that time at all an easy one. The effect of Indian Home Rule had been, not only to disappoint many who had aspired to the Indian Civic Service, but to send home from India a whole host of Europeans who had lost their positions there and were now in search of employment. The field was consequently narrowed. Canon Dives was very urgent with me to take Holy Orders. “It is just your sort we want,” he was kind enough to say: “people who have stripped Life of its mysteries and looked Truth in the face.” I objected that I felt disqualified on theological grounds: my geographical training had taught me that what is nowhere is nothing, and the idea of a Supreme Being who was ubiquitous affronted my intelligence. Could I, then, honestly take the pay of a Church which taught the existence of a God, when I myself believed in nothing of the sort? He was quite unshaken in his opinion. “After all,” he said, “relativity is in the air, and we are coming to realize, I think, that all truth is relative to the person who believes it. To preach to a congregation of orthodox people and bid them live up to their lights is not necessarily the work of one who is herself an orthodox believer. Besides, you would not get much pay at first. And, as time went on, you might well find that your own ideas would come to frame themselves in a more traditional setting.” I thus very nearly became a deaconess (it was not, of course, till nearly twenty years later that women could attain any higher rank in the ministry). But family opposition (“My dear,” said Miss Linthorpe, “you’d run off with the examining chaplain”) combined with my absence of any definite religious convictions to prevent it. There was some talk of my going into my father’s business, but its prospects were still far from reassuring, and my mother urged, with some common sense, that it would be a mistake to have all our eggs in one basket. And then the authorities at St. Lucy’s solved the difficulty by obtaining for me, as the result of my geographical successes, a travelling scholarship which, on condition of my residing abroad, would make it unnecessary for me to think further about my career for the next two years.