g for him, a can of hot
water, a sponging tin and a small iron bed.

I think I understand what he means. Somehow or other a well-ordered
monastery represents the Least Common Multiple of nearly all pleasant
houses. It has the largeness and amplitude of a castle, and the
plainness of decent poverty. It has none of that theatricality which it
is supposed to have, none of the dreaminess or the sentimentality with
which Protestants endow it. He had passed just now through, first, a
network of small stairways, archways, vestibules and passages, and then
along two immense corridors with windows on one side and closed doors on
the other. Everywhere there was the same quiet warmth and decency and
plainness--stained deal, uncarpeted boards, a few oil pictures in the
lower corridor, an image or two at the turn and head of the stairs; it
was lighted clearly and unaffectedly by incandescent gas, and the only
figures he had seen were of two or three monks, with hooded heads (they
had raised these hoods slightly in salutation as he passed), each going
about his business briskly and silently. There was even a cheerful smell
of cooking at the end of one of the corridors, and he had caught a
glimpse of two or three aproned lay brothers, busy in the firelight and
glow of a huge kitchen, over great copper pans.

The sense of familiarity, then, is perfectly intelligible: a visitor to
a monastery steps, indeed, into a busy and well-ordered life, but there
is enough room and air and silence for him to preserve his individuality
too.

* * * * *

As soon as he was washed and dressed, he sat down in a chair before the
fire; but almost immediately there came a tap on his door, and the
somewhat inflamed face of the Major looked in.

"Frankie?" he whispered, and, reassured, came in and closed the door
behind. (He looked very curiously small and unimportant, thought Frank.
Perhaps it was the black suit that had been lent him.)

"By gad, Frankie ... we're in clover," he whispered, still apparently
under the impression that somehow he was in church. "There are some
other chaps, you know, off the roads too, but they're down by the lodge
somewhere." (He broke off and then continued.) "I've got such a queer
Johnnie in my room--ah! you've got one, too."

He went up to examine a small plaster statue of a saint above the
prie-dieu.

"It's all right, isn't it?" said Frank sleepily.

"And there's another Johnnie's na