intensely. . . . But you wouldn't understand, Joan. You weren't built
that way.'

'No,' assented Mrs Gildea doubtfully.

'But,' went on Biddy brightly, 'I think sometimes that if one could get
to the pitch of feeling nothing matters, it would be a way of reaching
the "letting go" stage which one MUST arrive at before one can even
BEGIN to live in the Eternal.'

There seemed something a little comic in the notion of Bridget O'Hara
living in the Eternal, and yet Mrs Gildea realised that there really
was a certain stable quality underneath the flashing, ever changing
temperamental sheath, which might perhaps form a base for the Verities
to rest upon.

'Beelzebub didn't teach you that,' she said.

'No, quite the contrary. It all came out of my concentration studies
and the Higher Thought Centre where I met some most original
dears--Christian Scientists and Spiritualists--and then these
Socialists--not a bit on the lines of the old Fabians and Bernard Shavians
and the rest who used to believe only in Matter--specially landed property
matter--and in parcelling that out among themselves. My friends are
for parcelling out what they call the Divine Intelligence, which they
say will bring them everything they need for the good of others and,
incidentally, themselves. Of course none of them have a penny. But they
do contrive to get what they want for other people--it was a soup
kitchen this winter where they fed 11,000 starving poor. Only, when
they begin, they never have the smallest idea of HOW it's going to be