beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guided its little
fearful boots over the crossing, while he arrested the billowy omnibuses
on either side with an imperious glance, is gone, and all that certain
processional, barbaric gayety of the place is gone.

"Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert," said March, voicing their
common feeling of the change.

They turned and went into the beautiful church, and found themselves in
time for the matin service. Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, in
the dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music took them with
solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift them
heavenward. They came out, reluctant, into the dazzle and bustle of the
street, with a feeling that they were too good for it, which they
confessed to each other with whimsical consciousness.

"But no matter how consecrated we feel now," he said, "we mustn't forget
that we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we went
to the Vienna Cafe for breakfast--to gratify an aesthetic sense, to renew
the faded pleasure of travel for a moment, to get back into the Europe of
our youth. It was a purely Pagan impulse, Isabel, and we'd better own
it."

"I don't know," she returned. "I think we reduce ourselves to the bare
bones too much. I wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do.
Sometimes I should like to blink them. I should like to think I was
devouter than I am, and younger and prettier."

"Better not; you couldn't keep it up. Honesty is the best policy even in
such things."