l with gold hair and an
undulating walk. Pointed observations had been made.... Lady Lovedale
had looked none too well pleased. He didn't wish to be cynical, but he
did want to know whether he was going to fall in love?... They had now
arrived at that point when love-making or an interruption in their
intimacy was imperative. He did not regret having offered her the money
to go abroad to study, it was well he should have done so, but he should
not have said, "But _I'll_ go to see you in Paris." She was a clever
girl, and knew as well as he how such adventures must end.... She was a
religious girl, a devout Catholic, and as he had himself been brought
up in that religion, he knew how it restrained the sexual passion or
fashioned it in the mould of its dogma. But we are animals first, we are
religious animals afterwards. Religious defences must yield before the
pressure of the more original instinct, unless, indeed, hers was a
merely sexual conscience. The lowest forms of Anglicanism are reduced to
perceiving conscience nowhere except in sex. The Catholic was more
concerned with matters of faith. Not in France, Italy or Spain did
Catholicism enter so largely into the private life of the individual as
it did in England. The foreign, or to be more exact, the native Catholic
had worn the yoke till it fitted loose on his shoulders. His was a more
eclectic Christianity; he took what suited him and left the rest. But in
England Romanism had never shaken itself free from the Anglican
conscience. The convert never acquired the humanities of Rome, and in
addition the lover had to contend against the confessional. But in
Evelyn's case he could set against the confessional the delirium of
success, the joy of art, the passion of emulation, jealousy and
ambition, and last, but far from least, the ache of her own passionate
body. Remembering the fear and humility with which he had been used to
approach the priest, and the terror of eternal fire in which he had
waited for him to pronounce absolution, Owen paused to think how far
such belief was from him now. Yet he had once believed--in a way. He
wondered at the survival of such a belief in the nineteenth century, and
asked himself if confession were not inveterate in man. The artist in
his studio, the writer in his study, strive to tell their soul's secret;
the peasant throws himself at the feet of the priest, for, like them, he
would unburden himself of that terrible weight of inwardnes