e must speak to him about religion; she wanted to know if he were
sure, and how he had arrived at his certitudes.... She wanted to talk to
him about life, death and immortality. She had tried to lead the
conversation into a religious discussion, but he seemed to avoid it, and
just as she was about to put a definite question, Ulick came into the
room. He stood crushing his grey felt hat between his hands, a somewhat
curious figure, and she watched him talking to Monsignor, thinking of
the difference of vision. As Ulick said, everything was in that. Men
were divided by the difference of their visions. She was curious to know
how the dogmatic and ritualistic vision of Monsignor affected Ulick, and
when the prelate left she asked him.

He was as ingenuous and unexpected on this subject as he was on all
subjects. If the antique priest, he said, clothed himself in purple, it
was to produce an exaltation in himself which would bring him closer to
the idea, which would render him, as it were, accessible to it. But the
vestments of the modern priest had lost their original meaning, they
were mere parade. This explanation was very like Ulick; she smiled, and
was interested, but her interest was passing and superficial. The advent
of the priest had moved her in the depths of her being, and her mind was
thick with lees of ancient sentiment, and wrecks of belief had floated
up and hung in mid memory. She knew that the beauty of the ritual, the
eternal psalms, the divine sacrifice, the very ring of the bell, the
antiquity of the language, lifted her out of herself, and into a higher,
a more intense ecstasy than the low medium of this world's desires. And
if she did not believe that the bread and wine were the true body and
blood of God, she still believed in the real Presence. She was aware of
it as she might be of the presence of someone in the room, though he
might be hidden from her eyes. Though the bread and wine might not be
the body and blood of Christ, still the act of consecration did seem to
her to call down the spirit of God, and it had seemed to her to inhabit
the church at the moment of consecration. It might not be true to Owen,
nor yet to Ulick, but it was true to her--it was a difference of
vision.... She sat buried in herself. Then she walked to the window
confused and absorbed, with something of the dread of a woman who finds
herself suddenly with child. When Ulick came to her she did not notice
him, and when he asked