“Yes, Dada,” she said absently, not sure how far she could trust his mood. Then she walked up to him and drew her hand across his cheek and gave his tie a twitch. He drew his arm about her and kissed her forehead.
“Let this be between ourselves,” he said. “I’ll go around and come in the front way.”
She went up the back stairs and reappeared in the living-room, whistling. Constance and Shepherd were still reading before the fire where she had left them.
After supper—served at the dining-room table tonight—Leila was unwontedly silent, and the attempts of Constance and Shepherd to be gay were sadly deficient in spontaneity. Mills’s Sunday, which had begun with high hopes, had been bitterly disappointing. Though outwardly tranquil and unbending a little more than usual, his mind was elsewhere.
VI
The happy life manifestly was not to be won merely by going to church. At the back of his mind, with all his agnosticism, he had entertained a superstitious belief that in Christianity there was some secret of happiness revealed to those who placed themselves receptively close to the throne of grace. This was evidently a mistake; or at least it was clear from the day’s experience that the boon was less easy of attainment than he had believed.
He recalled what the rector of St. Barnabas had said to him the morning he had gone in to inspect the Mills window—that walls do not make the church, that the true edifice is within man’s own breast. Lindley shouldn’t say things like that, to perplex the hearer, baffle him, create a disagreeable uneasiness! This hint of a God whose tabernacle is in every man’s heart was displeasing. Mills didn’t like the idea of carrying God around with him. To grant any such premise would be to open the way for doubts as to his omnipotence in his own world; and Franklin Mills was not ready for that. He groped for a deity who wouldn’t be a nuisance, like a disagreeable guest in the house, upsetting the whole establishment! God should be a convenience, subject to call like a doctor or a lawyer. But how could a man reach Lindley’s God, who wasn’t in the church at all, but within man himself?
In his pondering he came back to his own family. He didn’t know Shepherd; he didn’t know Leila. And this was all wrong. He knew Millicent Harden better than he knew either of his children.
He had friends who were good pals with their children, and he wondered how they managed it. Maybe it was the spirit of the age that was the trouble. It was a common habit to fix responsibility for all the disturbing moral and social phenomena of the time on the receding World War, or the greed for gain, or the diminished zeal for religion. This brought him again to God; uncomfortable—the reflection that thought in all its circling and tangential excursions does somehow land at that mysterious door.... Leila must be dealt with. She was much too facile in dissimulation. He was confident that no other Mills had ever been like that.
When they reached home he followed Leila into her room. He took the cigarette she offered him and sat down in the low rocking chair she pulled out for him—a befrilled feminine contrivance little to his taste. Utterly at a loss as to how he could most effectively reprimand her for her attempted deception and give her to understand that he would never countenance a marriage with Thomas, he was relieved when she took the initiative.