each time he yielded to it he amused himself by
thinking of as a private concession to cowardice. The great church had
no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none
the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what
he couldn't elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday
he had earned. He was tired, but he wasn't plain--that was the pity
and the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the
door very much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on
the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar. He
trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the
cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon
him its spell. He might have been a student under the charm of a
museum--which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of
life, he would have liked to be free to be. This form of sacrifice did
at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite
sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee,
the things of the world could fall into abeyance. That was the
cowardice, probably--to dodge them, to beg the question, not to deal
with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too brief,
too vain, to hurt any one but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful
kindness for certain persons whom he met, figures of mystery and
anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked as those
who were fleeing from justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light,
and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of
the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.

Thus it was at all events that, one morning some dozen days after the
dinner in the Boulevard Malesherbes at which Madame de Vionnet had been
present with her daughter, he was called upon to play his part in an
encounter that deeply stirred his imagination. He had the habit, in
these contemplations, of watching a fellow visitant, here and there,
from a respectable distance, remarking some note of behaviour, of
penitence, of prostration, of the absolved, relieved state; this was
the manner in which his vague tenderness took its course, the degree of
demonstration to which it naturally had to confine itself. It hadn't
indeed so felt its responsibility as when on this occasion he suddenly
measured the suggestive effect of a lady whose suprem