for a
time perfectly furious, because I had always said to myself that
Catholics, and especially priests, would always understand. But before I
got to York I saw what an ass I had made of myself. Of course, the
priest was perfectly right (I saw that before I got ten yards away,
though I wouldn't acknowledge it for another five miles). I was a dirty
tramp, and I talked like a brazen fool. (I remember thinking my
'openness' to him rather fine and manly!) Well, that made me smaller
still.

"Then a sort of despair came on me when the police got me turned out of
my work in York. I know it was only a little thing (though I still
think it unfair), but it was like a pebble in your boot when you're
already going lame from something else.

"And then came Jenny's letter. (I want to write about that rather
carefully.)

"I said just now that I was getting to feel smaller and smaller. That's
perfectly true, but there was still a little hard lump in the middle
that would not break. Things might have gone crumbling away at me for
ever, and I might have got smaller still, but they wouldn't have smashed
me.

"Now there were two things that I held on to all this time--my religion
and Jenny. I gave them turns, so to speak, though Jenny was never
absent. When everything religious tasted flat and dull and empty, I
thought about Jenny: when things were better--when I had those two or
three times I told Father Hildebrand about (...)--I still thought of
Jenny, and imagined how splendid it would be when we were both Catholics
together and married. But I never dreamed that Jenny would ever be angry
or disappointed. I wouldn't talk about her to anybody ever, because I
was so absolutely certain of her. I knew, I thought, that the whole
world might crumble away, but that Jenny would always understand, down
at the bottom, and that she and I would remain....

"Well, then came her letter.

"Honestly, I don't quite know what I was doing inside for the next week
or so. Simply everything was altered. I never had any sort of doubt that
she meant what she said, and it was as if there wasn't any sun or moon
or sky. It was like being ill. Things happened round me: I ate and drank
and walked, but the only thing I wanted was to get away, and get down
somewhere into myself and hide. Religion, of course, seemed no good at
all. I don't understand quite what people mean by 'consolations' of
religion. Religion doesn't seem to me a thing like Art or Music, i