“This war is like a wasting fever in the blood and in the mind,” said Peter. “All Europe is ill. But with him it mixes with the old fever. That splinter at Fricourt was no joke for him. He oughtn’t to have gone out. He’s getting horribly lean, and his eye is like a garnet.”
“I love him,” said Joan.
But she did not want to discuss Oswald just then.
“About this new theology of yours, Peter,” she said....
“Well?” said Peter.
“What do you mean by this Old Experimenter of yours? Is he—God?”
“I don’t know. I thought he was. He’s—— He’s a Symbol. He’s just a Caricature I make to express how all this”—Peter swept his arm across the sunlit world—“seems to stand to me. If one can’t draw the thing any better, one has to make a caricature.”
Joan considered that gravely.
“I thought of him first in my dream as the God of the Universe,” Peter explained.
“You couldn’t love a God like that,” Joan remarked.