It exasperated her beyond measure. She could not get out of
the Church the satisfaction he got. The thought of her soul was
intimately mixed up with the thought of her own self. Indeed,
her soul and her own self were one and the same in her. Whereas
he seemed simply to ignore the fact of his own self, almost to
refute it. He had a soul--a dark, inhuman thing caring
nothing for humanity. So she conceived it. And in the gloom and
the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free, like some
strange, underground thing, abstract.
He was very strange to her, and, in this church spirit, in
conceiving himself as a soul, he seemed to escape and run free
of her. In a way, she envied it him, this dark freedom and
jubilation of the soul, some strange entity in him. It
fascinated her. Again she hated it. And again, she despised him,
wanted to destroy it in him.
This snowy morning, he sat with a dark-bright face beside
her, not aware of her, and somehow, she felt he was conveying to
strange, secret places the love that sprang in him for her. He
sat with a dark-rapt, half-delighted face, looking at a little
stained window. She saw the ruby-coloured glass, with the shadow
heaped along the bottom from the snow outside, and the familiar
yellow figure of the lamb holding the banner, a little darkened
now, but in the murky interior strangely luminous, pregnant.
She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The
lamb, looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a
forepaw, in the cleft of which was dangerously perched a little
flag with a red cross. Very pale yellow, the lamb, with greenish
shadows. Since she was a child she had liked this creature, with
the same feeling she felt for the little woolly lambs on green
legs that children carried home from the fair every year. She
had always liked these toys, and she had the same amused,
childish liking for this church lamb. Yet she had always been
uneasy about it. She was never sure that this lamb with a flag
did not want to be more than it appeared. So she half mistrusted
it, there was a mixture of dislike in her attitude to it.
Now, by a curious gathering, knitting of his eyes, the
faintest tension of ecstasy on his face, he gave her the
uncomfortable feeling that he was in correspondence with the
creature, the lamb in the window. A cold wonder came over
her--her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless,
timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was
he doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in
the glass?
Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag.
Suddenly she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the
tradition seized on her, she was transported to another world.
And she hated it, resisted it.