 of outrage was deep, rancorous, and ever present; he
felt that he was a good fellow wronged. As for Madame de Cintré's conduct, it
struck him with a kind of awe, and the fact that he was powerless to understand
it or feel the reality of its motives only deepened the force with which he had
attached himself to her. He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble
him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the
form in which her religious feelings had moulded themselves would have seemed to
him on his own part a rather pretentious affectation of Protestant zeal. If such
superb white flowers as that could bloom in Catholic soil, the soil was not
insalubrious. But it was one thing to be a Catholic, and another to turn nun -
on your hands! There was something lugubriously comical in the way Newman's
thoroughly contemporaneous optimism was confronted with this dusky old-world
expedient. To see a woman made for him and for motherhood to his children
juggled away in this tragic travesty - it was a thing to rub one's eyes over, a
nightmare, an illusion, a hoax. But the hours passed away without disproving the
thing, and leaving him only the after-sense of the vehemence with which he had
embraced Madame de Cintré. He remembered her words and her looks; he turned them
over and tried to shake the mystery out of them, and to infuse them with an
endurable meaning. What had she meant by her feeling being a kind of religion?
It was the religion simply of the family laws, the religion of which her
implacable little mother was the high-priestess. Twist the thing about as her
generosity would, the one certain fact was that they had used force against her.
Her generosity had tried to screen them, but Newman's heart rose into his throat
at the thought that they should go scot-free.
    The twenty-four hours wore themselves away, and the next morning Newman
sprang to his feet with the resolution to return to Fleurières and demand
another interview with Madame de Bellegarde and her son. He lost no time in
putting it into practice. As he rolled swiftly over the excellent road in the
little calèche furnished him at the inn at Poitiers, he drew forth, as it were,
from the very safe place in his mind to which he had consigned it, the last
information given him by poor Valentin. Valentin had told him he could do
something with it, and Newman thought it would be well to have it at hand. This
was
