under-world. He remembered the gloomy assembly-room and the wretched
assembly he had just left with a pang; all their wounds and hidden
defects were mercilessly exposed and examined through a magnifying-
glass, so that the lower classes might acquire that true humility
failing which the upper classes cannot enjoy their amiable weaknesses
in peace. And for the first time something jarring had come into this
life.

However much Theodore was tossed about between his natural yearning
for the only half-realised temptations of the world, and his newly
formed desire to turn his back on this world and his mind heavenwards,
he did not break the promise given to his mother. The religious
teaching which he and the other catechumens received from the minister
in the church, did not fail to impress him deeply. He was often gloomy
and wrapped in thought and felt that life was not what it ought to be.
He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been
committed, which it was now everybody's business to hide by practising
countless deceptions; he compared himself to a fly caught in a spider's
web: the more it struggled to regain its freedom, the more it entangled
itself, until at last it died miserably, strangled by the cruel threads.

One evening--the minister scorned no trick likely to produce an effect
on his hard-headed pupils--they were having a lesson in the choir. It
was in January. Two gas jets lighted up the choir, illuminating and
distorting the marble figures on the altar. The whole of the large
church with its two barrel-vaults, which crossed one another, lay in
semi-darkness. In the background the shining organ pipes faintly
reflected the gas flames; above it the angels blowing their trumpets
to summon the sleepers before the judgment seat of their maker, looked
merely like sinister, threatening human figures above life size; the