"Well, what do you make out for yourself?"
"I haven't made it out exactly. It's as if some great big hand had pulled aside a curtain—but it's a curtain that I didn't know was there. See?"
"Yes, I see. And what does it show you?"
"That's the funny part of it. I can't tell you what it shows me. I don't exactly see it; I only know—mind you, I'm just telling you how it seems to me—I only know that it's God."
"But I suppose, if you know that it's God, you have an idea of what it's like?"
"Ye-es; it's like—like a country into which I'm traveling—not with my body—see?—but with my self. No," he corrected, "that's not it. It isn't a country; it's more like a life. Oh, shucks! I haven't got it straight yet. Now look! This is the way it is. Suppose that everything we see was alive—that these chairs were alive, and the walls, and the table—that every blamed thing we ever touch or use was alive, and had a voice. See?" Bob nodded that he saw. "Now, suppose every voice was trying to make you understand things. The table would say, 'This is the way God wants you to work'; and the chair, 'This is the way God wants you to rest'; and the walls, 'This is the way God stands round you and backs you up.' Everything would be helping you then, instead of putting itself dead against you the way we have it here."
"I get the idea; but would that be God?"
Over this question the boy's face brooded thoughtfully.
"It mightn't be God in the way that you're you and I'm me. It would be more like a way of knowing God. It's like my case in the courts. It's set down as 'The People against Edward S. Follett.' But I don't see the People; I only feel what they do to me. It's something like that. I don't see God; but I kind of feel—" He broke with another apologetic laugh. "Oh, I guess it's all wrong. Gussie'd call me a gump. It just kind of gets you; that's all. It makes me feel as if I was moving on into something—but I guess I'm not."
The pensive silence that followed was broken by Bob's saying: