He began to feel his heart drawn at times, in some strange, tender fashion previously unknown to him, to the blue of the sky, especially in the first sweetness of a summer morning. His soul would now and then seem to go out of him, in a passion of embrace, to the simplest flower. He would spread out his arms to the wind, now when it met him in its strength, now when it kissed his face. He never admitted to himself that it was one force in all the forms that drew him—that perhaps it was the very God, the All in all about him. Neither did he question much with himself as to how the development, rather than change, had begun. Whether God did this, or was this, or whether it was all a result of Barbara’s casting her light on the things he saw and felt, he scarcely asked. But fully he recognized the fact that nature was more alive than she had ever been to him. The thought of Barbara went on growing dear to him. And all the time a divine power of truth and beauty had laid hold upon him, and was working in him as only the powers of God can work in a man.

Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in a God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a god that ought to be believed in. Perhaps the one to be blamed is he who, by inattention to the duties given him, has become less able to believe in God than he once was. Because he did not obey the true voice when it came, God may have to let him taste what it would be to have no God. A man may have been born of so many generations of unbelief that now, at this moment, he cannot believe, that now, at this moment, he has no notion of a God at all and cannot care whether there be a God or not. But he can still be true to what he knows he ought to do. That alone can clear the moral atmosphere and make it possible for the true idea of a God to be born in him.

For some time Richard saw little of Barbara.