"So I shall mug up those decimals and things and then go and be his secretary. I know more or less how he wrote his _Vicarage_. He used to stride up and down my room, thinking aloud about it. And this will be the same, only enormous! He says he wants to make it as Moses made his Decalogue? He shall, bless his heart. Why shouldn't he? I don't see your stuffy old objections, George." "One of them is that Moses didn't 'make' the Decalogue. He went up into Sinai for it." "Well, leave Moses out then. Any other reason?" "I've told you. If it isn't exactly blasphemous, it's getting on that way." "Why?" she said with heat. "Was the _Vicarage_ blasphemous? He's simply going to do the _Vicarage_ again, but on a huger scale. If he can write a gigantic book why should you say to him 'No, you mustn't write that--write a littler one instead'? He's perfectly entitled to write the biggest book he can. He's just as much entitled to it as you or any other writer. You only call it those names because it's bigger than yours." She glowed with jealousy for his fame. He was her demi-god, and she would have had all the world bow down before him. She would _not_ have him second to Homer--she would _not_ have him second to Shakespeare. At least so it struck me, and I could only shake my head again and again and repeat that in my opinion it was not a legitimate ambition. We had mounted to the top of a motor-bus, where we occupied a back seat. For some minutes she did not speak. Then, as she still continued silent, I looked at her face. At the same moment her face turned to mine. What worlds away from the truth I was that clear look told me. His fame? She didn't care twopence for his fame, except that it might amuse him. His book? She didn't care whether he wrote his book or whether he didn't. To her, fame and books were the vanities with which men so incomprehensibly amuse themselves when they might be thinking of something that mattered. It was enormously more than that that her eyes told me on the top of that east-bound bus that morning.