"The trouble is," he began, groping about in his limited vocabulary, "I don't seem to want anybody else's God. I just want to give mine full swing." And at this point he forgot his grandmother's presence, and his previous experience of her incomprehension, and began to develop his own dream for his own ears. "And I don't even want to know what he is—not by reasoning him out, I mean. People didn't have to wait to learn about oxygen, and the way the lungs work, before they began to breathe, did they? And that's the way I feel about what I call my god—the sort of something in me that was there before I'd ever thought about it, and that stretches out and out, and takes in the stars and the ages, and very likely doesn't itself know why or how. What I want is to find out how to release that god, fly him up like a kite into the Infinite, way beyond creeds and formulas, and try to relate him to all the other … the other currents … that seem to be circling round you, a day like this … so that you get caught up in them yourself … and carried beyond Time and Space, and Good and Bad, to where the whole blamed thing is boiling over … Oh, hell take it, I don't know!" he groaned, and flung his head back despairingly.

Mrs. Scrimser listened, beaming, benedictory, her arms extended. "Oh Vanny, when you talk like that I do feel your call so clearly! You surely have inherited your grandfather's gift for speaking. You could fill the Alsop Avenue church clear away under the gallery, right now. 'The boy preacher'—they can often reach right down into the soul where the older men can't get a hearing. Don't you think, dear, such a gift ought to make you decide to go straight to Jesus?" She lifted her clasped hands with a "Nunc dimittis" gesture full of devotional sublimity. "If I could only hear you in the pulpit once I'd lay me down so peacefully," she murmured.