other people, to hear or look upon which is to feel the hypothesis of
an unseen world impossible. As he smiled amiably out of the midst of
his pontifical array on Gaston's scrupulous devotion, it was as if
the old Roman augur smiled not only to his fellow augur but to the
entire assistant world. In after years Gaston seemed to understand,
and, as a consequence of [40] understanding, to judge his old patron
equitably: the religious sense too, had its various species. The
nephew of his predecessor in the see, with a real sense of the divine
world but as something immeasurably distant, Monseigneur Guillard had
been brought by maladroit worldly good-fortune a little too close to
its immediate and visible embodiments. From afar, you might trace
the divine agency on its way. But to touch, to handle it, with these
fleshly hands:--well! for Monseigneur, that was by no means to
believe because the thing was "incredible, or absurd." He had
smiled, not certainly from irreverence, nor (a prelate for half his
life) in conscious incredulity, but only in mute surprise, at an
administration of divine graces--this administration in which he was
a high priest--in itself, to his quite honest thinking, so unfitting,
so improbable. And was it that Gaston too was a less independent
ruler of his own mental world than he had fancied, that he derived
his impressions of things not directly from them, but mediately from
other people's impressions about them, and he needed the pledge of
their assents to ratify his own? Only, could that, after all, be a
real sun, at which other people's faces were not irradiated? And
sometimes it seemed, with a riotous swelling of the heart, as if his
own wondrous appetite in these matters had been deadened by surfeit,
and there would be a pleasant sense of liberty, of escape out-of-
doors, [41] could he be as little touched as almost all other people
by Our Lady's Church, and old associations, and all those relics, and
those dark, close, fragrant aisles.