nce with the
creature, the lamb in the window. A cold wonder came over
her--her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless,
timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was
he doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in
the glass?

Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag.
Suddenly she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the
tradition seized on her, she was transported to another world.
And she hated it, resisted it.

Instantly, it was only a silly lamb in the glass again. And
dark, violent hatred of her husband swept up in her. What was he
doing, sitting there gleaming, carried away, soulful?

She shifted sharply, she knocked him as she pretended to pick
up her glove, she groped among his feet.

He came to, rather bewildered, exposed. Anybody but her would
have pitied him. She wanted to rend him. He did not know what
was amiss, what he had been doing.

As they sat at dinner, in their cottage, he was dazed by the
chill of antagonism from her. She did not know why she was so
angry. But she was incensed.

"Why do you never listen to the sermon?" she asked, seething
with hostility and violation.

"I do," he said.

"You don't--you don't hear a single word."

He retired into himself, to enjoy his own sensation. There
was something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld
refuge. The young girl hated to be in the house with him when he
was like this.

After dinner, he retired into the parlour, continuing in the
same state of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to
her. Then he went to the book-shelf and took down books to look
at, that she had scarcely glanced over.

He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations in old
missals, and then over a book on paintings in churches: Italian,
English, French and German. He had, when he was sixteen,
discovered a Roman Catholic bookshop where he could find such
things.

He turned the leaves in absorption, absorbed in looking, not
thinking. He was like a man whose eyes were in his chest, she
said of him later.

She came to look at the things with him. Half they fascinated
her. She was puzzled, interested, and antagonistic.

It was when she came to pictures of the Pieta that she burst
out.

"I do think they're loathsome," she cried.

"What?" he said, surprised, abstracted.

"Those bodies with slits in them, posing to be
worshipped."

"You see, it means the Sacraments, the Bread