“She is Scotch Early Victorian in some things and extremely advanced in others,” he went on. “She has strong ideas of her own as to how he shall be brought up. She’s rather Greek in her feeling for his being as perfect physically and mentally as she can help him to be. She believes things. It was she who said what you did not understand—about the Creative Intention.”
“I suppose she is religious,” Feather said. “Scotch people often are but their religion isn’t usually like that. Creative Intention’s a new name for God, I suppose. I ought to know all about God. I’ve heard enough about Him. My father was not a clergyman but he was very miserable, and it made him so religious that he was almost one. We were every one of us christened and catechized and confirmed and all that. So God’s rather an old story.”
“Queer how old—from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,” said Coombe. “It’s an ancient search—that for the Idea—whether it takes form in metal or wood or stone.”
“Well,” said Feather, holding her bit of gauze away from her the better to criticize the pink flower. “As almost a clergyman’s daughter I must say that if there is one thing God didn’t do, it was to fill the world with beautiful people and things as if it was only to be happy in. It was made to—to try us by suffering and—that sort of thing. It’s a—a—what d’ye call it? Something beginning with P.”
“Probation,” suggested Coombe regarding her with an expression of speculative interest. Her airy bringing forth of her glib time-worn little scraps of orthodoxy—as one who fished them out of a bag of long-discarded remnants of rubbish—was so true to type that it almost fascinated him for a moment.
“Yes. That’s it—probation,” she answered. “I knew it began with a P. It means ‘thorny paths’ and ‘seas of blood’ and, if you are religious, you ‘tread them with bleeding feet—’ or swim them as the people do in hymns. And you praise and glorify all the time you’re doing it. Of course, I’m not religious myself and I can’t say I think it’s pleasant—but I do know! Every body beautiful and perfect indeed! That’s not religion—it’s being irreligious. Good gracious, think of the cripples and lepers and hunchbacks!”
“And the idea is that God made them all—by way of entertaining himself?” he put it to her quietly.
“Well, who else did?” said Feather cheerfully.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Certain things I heard Mrs. Muir say suggested to one that it might be interesting to think it out.”
“Did she talk to you about God at afternoon tea?” said Feather. “It’s the kind of thing a religious Scotch woman might do.”