"No, you don't. You think I'm poking fun at you--just to be nasty. It isn't that. I'm serious--really. Only somehow--you don't impress me as much as you used to. You--your ideas--what you stand for--oh, they don't seem to very much matter. Your kind of religion seems to me--I've thought it more and more--it seems to me a sort of hobby. It's just for Sundays." He stared at her aghast, seeming to waver between grief and righteous anger. But he said nothing. She went on coolly. "I guess the trouble with you, Arnold, is that you're too much of a clergyman--not enough of an ordinary sinful man." He wavered no longer. His suspicion crystallised into certainty. His words came through his teeth as if shot from a cannon. The Reverend Arnold Imrie, for the first time in years, lost his temper, and lost it with a completeness and animation that was magnificent. He turned suddenly and glared at Judith, his face pale. Then he shot a trembling finger at her. "So," he snapped. "Six weeks of this--this--anarchist--can shatter the faith of a lifetime. Such a faith. A Wynrod, too.... It is--I dare not say what it is." But he did dare. He launched into a passionate diatribe, which to Judith, listening patiently, sounded very much like a funeral oration over the body of a notorious scoundrel, so compounded it was of scorn and pity and utter certainty of ultimate damnation and complacent self-satisfaction that he was not as such. It was accompanied by familiar pulpit gesticulations, used so long that they had become unconscious. As he talked he paced back and forth, pausing now and again to emphasise a point with a resounding thump on his hand. It was excellent--oratory. But all through she had the feeling that it was only a sermon, that the recital of her iniquities, so vividly phrased, was only academic. And as he made his peroration, more from a lack of breath than a lack of ideas, she laughed--mirthfully, unrestrainedly. He stopped as if shot. He stared at her as if he could not believe his ears. "Very wonderful, Arnold," said Judith lazily, "but very absurd."