Mrs. Scrimser turned her eloquent gray eyes on her grandson. "Don't a day like this almost make you feel as if you could get to God right through that blue up there?" she said, pointing heavenward with a big knotted hand. She had forgotten already about the abandoned lawn mower, and the need of tidying up. Whenever she saw her grandson all the groping aspirations in her unsatisfied nature woke and trembled into speech. But Vance did not care to hear about her God, who, once you stripped Him of her Biblical verbiage, was merely the Supreme Moralist of a great educational system in which Mrs. Scrimser held an important job.

"No, I don't feel as if anything would take me near God. And I don't exactly want to get near Him anyhow; what I want is to get way out beyond Him, out somewhere where He won't look any bigger than a speck, and the god in me can sort of walk all round Him."

Mrs. Scrimser glowed responsively: all the audacities enchanted her. "Oh, I see what you mean, Vanny," she cried. All her life she had always been persuaded that she saw what people meant; and the conviction had borne her triumphantly from one pinnacle of credulity to another. But her grandson smiled away her enthusiasm. "No, you don't; you don't see my god at all; I mean, the god in me."

His grandmother flushed up in her disappointment. "Why don't I, Vanny? I know all about the Immanence of God," she objected, almost resentfully.

Vance shook his head. It wasn't much fun arguing with his grandmother about God, but it was better than hearing eternally about new electric cleaners from his mother, or about real estate from Mr. Weston, or the reorganization of school grades from his sister Pearl. Vance respected efficiency, and even admired it; but of late he had come to feel that as a diet for the soul it was deficient in nourishment. He wondered that Mrs. Weston, who was such an authority on diet, had never thought of applying the moral equivalent of the vitamin test to the life they all led at Mapledale. He had an idea they were starving to death there without knowing it. But old Mrs. Scrimser at least knew that she was hungry, and his mind wandered back more indulgently to what she was saying.