of these last days. That would be to tell her
too much about himself - it being at present just from himself he was trying to
escape.
    This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same impulse
that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse to let things be, to
give them time to justify themselves or at least to pass. He was aware of having
no errand in such a place but the desire not to be, for the hour, in certain
other places; a sense of safety, of simplification, which 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 clustered 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