whom some all-subduing experience had wrought heroically, and who
still remembered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a great
deliverance.

His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies,
of places,--above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they
might have,--was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by
that peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave
discretion all around him, passed into the house. That intelligent
seriousness [97] about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to
remove those who lacked it into some strange species wholly alien
from himself, accumulating all the lessons of his experience since
those first days at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as
if in designed congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of
physical vision, into an actual picture. If the true value of souls
is in proportion to what they can admire, Marius was just then an
acceptable soul. As he passed through the various chambers, great
and small, one dominant thought increased upon him, the thought of
chaste women and their children--of all the various affections of
family life under its most natural conditions, yet developed, as if
in devout imitation of some sublime new type of it, into large
controlling passions. There reigned throughout, an order and purity,
an orderly disposition, as if by way of making ready for some
gracious spousals. The place itself was like a bride adorned for her
husband; and its singular cheerfulness, the abundant light
everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which he received a
deep impression though without precisely reckoning wherein it
resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast just at
first to the place to which he was next conducted by Cornelius still
with a sort of eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he