existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I
thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else,
from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes
for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I
told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that
grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C---- himself. For all
devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but
now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my
ears of

"The skirts of St. Paul has reached.
Having preached us those six Lent lectures,
More unctuous than ever he preached,"

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake
myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing,
but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honore, as I ran down the church
steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets
from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a
golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I
swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me.
He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white
profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could
see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that