But now his sense of outrage
was deep, rancorous, and ever present; he felt that he was a good fellow
wronged. As for Madame de Cintre'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 hand!
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 Cintre. 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.
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