iable smile, an underdone heart bleeding
amid streams of yellow sauce.

But what was chiefly characteristic of this bedizened porter's lodge
was a horribly sickening smell, the smell of lukewarm castor oil.

Durtal, nauseated by this odour, was on the point of making his escape,
when the Abbe Plomb came in and took his arm. They went out together.

"Then you have just come back from Solesmes?" said Durtal.

"As you see."

"And were you satisfied with your visit?"

"Enchanted," and the Abbe smiled at the impatience he could detect in
Durtal's accents.

"What do you think of the monastery?"

"I think it most interesting to visit, both from the monastic and from
the artistic point of view. Solesmes is a great convent, the parent
House of the Benedictine Order in France, and it has a flourishing
school of novices. What is it that you want to know, exactly?"

"Why, everything you can tell me."

"Well, then, I may tell you that ecclesiastical art, brought to its very
highest expression, is fascinating in that monastery. No one can
conceive of the magnificence of the liturgy and of plain-song who has
not heard them at Solesmes. If Notre Dame des Arts had a special
sanctuary, it undoubtedly would be there."

"Is the chapel ancient?"

"A part of the old church remains, and the famous Solesmes sculpture,
dating from the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, there are some quite
disastrous windows in the apse: the Virgin between Saint Peter and Saint
Paul; modern glass in its most piercing atrocity. But, then, where is
decent glass to be had?"

"Nowhere. We have only to look at the transparent pictures let into the
walls of our new churches to appreciate the incurable idiocy of painters
who insist on treating window panes from cartoons, as they do subject
pictures--and such subjects! and such pictures! All turned out by the
gross from cheap glass melters, whose thin material dots the pavement of
the church with spots like confetti, strewing lollipops of colour
wherever the light falls.

"Would it not be far better to accept the colourless scheme of
window-glass used at Citeaux, where a decorative effect was produced by
a design in the lead lines; or to imitate the fine grisailles,
iridescent from age, which may still be seen at Bourges, at Reims, and
even here, in our cathedral?"

"Certainly," said the Abbe. "But to return to our monastery. Nowhere, I
repeat, are the services performed with so much pomp. You should