Half an hour later she was looking up at the facade of Notre Dame through the rain, and seeing there these words:  “I shall be waiting at Austin Farm to hear if you are at all able to sympathize with me in what I have done.  The memory of our last words together may help you to imagine with what anxiety I shall be waiting.”

She pushed open the greasy, shining leather door, passed into the interior, and stood for a moment in the incense-laden gloom of the nave.  A mass was being said.  The rapidly murmured Latin words came to her in a dim drone, in which she heard quite clearly, quite distinctly:  “There is another kind of beauty I faintly glimpse—­that isn’t just sweet smells and lovely sights and harmonious lines—­it’s the beauty that can’t endure disharmony in conduct, the fine, true ear for the loveliness of life lived at its best—­Sylvia, finest, truest Sylvia, it’s what you could, if you would—­you more than any other woman in the world—­if we were together to try—­”

Sylvia sank to her knees on a prie-Dieu and hid her face in her hands, trying to shut out the words, and yet listening to them so intently that her breath was suspended....  “What Morrison said is true—­for him, since he feels it to be true.  No man can judge for another.  But other things are true too, things that concern me.  It’s true that an honest man cannot accept an ease founded, even remotely, on the misery of others.  And my life has been just that.  I don’t know what success I shall have with the life that’s beginning, but I know at least it will begin straight.  There seems a chance for real shapeliness if the foundations are all honest—­doesn’t there?  Oh, Sylvia—­oh, my dearest love, if I could think you would begin it with me, Sylvia!  Sylvia!”

The girl sprang up and went hastily out of the church.  The nun kneeling at the door, holding out the silent prayer for alms for the poor, looked up in her face as she passed and then after her with calm, understanding eyes.  Kneeling there, day after day, she had seen many another young, troubled soul fleeing from its own thoughts.

Sylvia crossed the parvis of Notre Dame, glistening wet, and passed over the gray Seine, slate under the gray mist of the rain.  Under her feet the impalpable dust of a city turned to gray slime which clung to her shoes.  She walked on through a narrow, mean street of mediaeval aspect where rag-pickers, drearily oblivious of the rain, quarreled weakly over their filthy piles of trash.  She looked at them in astonishment, in dismay, in horror.  Since leaving La Chance, save for that one glimpse over the edge back in the Vermont mountains, she had been so consistently surrounded by the padded satin of possessions that she had forgotten how actual poverty looked.  In fact, she had never had more than the briefest fleeting glances at it.  This was so extravagant, so extreme, that it seemed impossible to her.  And yet—­and yet—­She looked fleetingly into those pale, dingy, underfed, repulsive faces and wondered if coal-miners’ families looked like that.