Ulick Invern preferred the short cut down the hill to the smoother roundabout road, which, though shaded, was dusty. It was the last week of his vacation, much needed, little desired. He was loath to leave New York, best-beloved city after Paris; but his doctor advised him to try New Hampshire to relieve his hay-fever. As he went across the fields of the Forest Hills park he was forced to admit that the fortnight in Franconia had put him on his feet. No sneezing, no insomnia, no writing, lots of reading. Such reading. He had made up his mind that no fiction, either frivolous or serious, would he fetch in his trunk; not even his adored Flaubert. Nothing but books dealing with the origins of religious beliefs, mystic books; Thomas à Kempis, Apollo, by Reinach, several Cardinal Newman volumes, the Old Testament, Browning, and as a concession to his profane leanings, a copy of Petronius in the original. Ulick was a fair latinist; his literary tastes versatile. This serene September forenoon he pondered the idea of a new religion. He had been reading in Reinach's Apollo of the mushroom swiftness with which any crazy silly superstition grows overnight in proper soil. The more ignorant the mob the easier it is to convince with some insane doctrine. Witness the growth of Mormonism or the new cult in America which already boasted a female pope and a big following. "A new religion" he said aloud. "Well, why not? the time seems ripe. Everything is unsettled. We are on the verge of something tremendous, a world-war, a social revolution, and yet we have never been seemingly more prosperous--I mean the entire earth. We must be entering into a new constellation; perhaps Mars is in the ascendant; or the sullen house of Saturn...." Ulick wasn't a star-worshipper, he liked to flirt with astrology as he flirted with a belief in the Fourth Dimension of Space. He was a well set-up young man still in the twenties, vigourous mentally and physically, nervous rather than muscular, yet capable of great powers of resistance. His friends, and he had many, said he was too volatile to compass distinction; he couldn't stick at anything over a month. This mania for the study of comparative religions was not new--he had only revived an old interest. Christianity with its stems deep in Judaism, Asiatic legends, Alexandrian mysticism; with its taboos, fetishes, totems, animism and magic, its lofty belief in the idealism of Jesus and its mumbo-jumbo conjurations and incredibly absurd miracles--this welter of old-world faiths and debasing superstition, a polytheistic judaism, held his fancy, for, as a former student of theology, he saw more clearly the polyphonic criss-crossing of ideas and ceremonies than the majority of critics. A palimpsest, rather, many palimpsests, was this religion, which in less than two thousand years has undergone more radical changes than any that preceded it. A chameleon among religions, compared with which Buddhism is a rock of eternal certitude.