"Good morning, Phyllis."
She said, with cold politeness: "Good morning." But she asked the spring morning in dumb piteousness, "Oh, why has he come? Why has he come to spoil it all?"
He sat down by her side. "This is the luckiest chance I've ever had—finding you here," he said. "You've had all my letters, haven't you?"
"Yes," she answered, "and I've torn them all up."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want them," she flashed on him: "I've destroyed them without reading them."
He flushed angrily. Apart from the personal affront, the fact that the literary products of a poet, precious and, in this case, sincere, should have been destroyed, unread, was an anti-social outrage.
"If it didn't please a woman to believe in God," he said, "and God came in Person and stood in front of her, she would run out of the room and call upon somebody to come and shoot Him for a burglar, just to prove she was right."
Phyllis was shocked. Her feminine mind pounced on the gross literalness of his rhetorical figure.
"I've never heard anything more blasphemous and horrible," she exclaimed, moving to her end of the bench. "Putting yourself in the position of the Almighty! Oh!" she flung out her hand. "Don't speak to me."