Of course she had been brought up strictly in the Roman Catholic faith.  And in her own esteem she was still an honest Catholic.  For years she had not confessed and therefore had not communicated.  For years she had had a desire to cast herself down at a confessional-box, but she had not done so because of one of the questions in the Petit Paroissien which she used:  “Avez-vous peche, par pensee, parole, ou action, contre la purete ou la modestie?” And because also of the preliminary injunction:  “Maintenant essayez de vous rappeler vos peches, et combien de fois vous les avez commis.”  She could not bring herself to do that.  Once she had confessed a great deal to a priest at Sens, but he had treated her too lightly; his lightness with her had indeed been shameful.  Since then she had never confessed.  Further, she knew herself to be in a state of mortal sin by reason of her frequent wilful neglect of the holy offices; and occasionally, at the most inconvenient moments, the conviction that if she died she was damned would triumph over her complacency.  But on the whole she had hopes for the future; though she had sinned, her sin was mysteriously not like other people’s sin of exactly the same kind.

And finally there was the Virgin Mary, the sweet and dependable goddess.  She had been neglecting the very clement Virgin Mary in favour of the Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague.  A whim, a thoughtless caprice, which she had paid for!  The Virgin Mary had withdrawn her defending shield.  At least that was the interpretation which Christine was bound to put upon the terrible incident of the previous night in the Promenade.  She had quite innocently been involved in a drunken row in the lounge.  Two military officers, one of whom, unnoticed by Christine, was intoxicated, and two women—­Madame Larivaudiere and Christine!  The Belgian had been growing more and more jealous of Christine....  The row had flamed up in the tenth of a second like an explosion.  The two officers—­then the two women.  The bright silvery sound of glass shattered on marble!  High voices, deep voices!  Half the Promenade had rushed vulgarly into the lounge, panting with a gross appetite to witness a vulgar scene.  And as the Belgian was jealous of the French girl, so were the English girls horribly jealous of all the foreign girls, and scornful too.  Nothing but the overwhelming desire of the management to maintain the perfect respectability of its Promenade had prevented a rough-and-tumble between the officers.  As for Madame Larivaudiere, she had been ejected and told never to return.  Christine had fled to the cloak-room, where she had remained for half an hour, and thence had vanished away, solitary, by the side entrance.  It was precisely such an episode as Christine’s mother would have deprecated in horror, and as Christine herself intensely loathed.  And she could never assuage the moral wound of it by confiding the affair to Gilbert.  She was mad about Gilbert; she thrilled