appeals more than an excellent success.

Folks turned to look after him more than once as he strode home.




CHAPTER VIII

A HIGHER STEP


As Chris, on the eve of his profession, looked back over the year that
had passed since his reception at the guest-house, he scarcely knew
whether it seemed like a week or a century. At times it appeared as if
the old life in the world were a kind of far-away picture in which he
saw himself as one detached from his present personality, moving among
curious scenes in which now he had no part; at other times the familiar
past rushed on him fiercely, deafened him with its appeal, and claimed
him as its own. In such moods the monastery was an intolerable prison,
the day's round an empty heart-breaking formality in which his soul was
being stifled, and even his habit, which he had once touched so
reverently, the badge of a fool.

The life of the world at such times seemed to him the only sanity; these
men used the powers that God had given them, were content with simple
and unostentatious doings and interests, reached the higher vocation by
their very naiveté, and did not seek to fly on wings that were not meant
to bear them. How sensible, Christopher told himself, was Ralph's ideal!
God had made the world, so Ralph lived in it--a world in which great and