"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." In spite of the atheistical Gedge, Phyllis believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Ten Commandments.