Mark concerned himself less with his own reception as a postulant.  The distinction between a probationer and a postulant was very slight, really an arbitrary one made by Father Burrowes for his own convenience, and until he had to decide whether he should petition to be clothed as a novice Mark did not feel that he was called upon to take himself too seriously as a monk.  For that reason he did not change his name, but preferred to stay Brother Mark.  The little ceremony of reception was carried through in Chapter before the brethren went into the Oratory to say Terce, and Brother Walter was so much excited when he heard himself addressed as Brother Simon that for a moment it seemed doubtful if he would be sufficiently calm to attend the profession of Brother Anselm at the conventual Mass.  However, during the clothing of Brother Lawrence as a novice Brother Simon quieted down, and even gave over counting the three knots in the rope with which he had been girdled.  Ordinarily, Brother Lawrence would have been clothed after Mass, but this morning it was felt that such a ceremony coming after the profession of Brother Anselm would be an anti-climax, and it was carried through in Chapter.  It took Brother Lawrence all he had ever heard and read about humility and obedience not to protest at the way his clothing on his own saint’s day, for which he had been made to wait nearly a year, was being carried through in such a hole in the corner fashion.  But he fixed his mind upon the torments of the blessed archdeacon on the gridiron and succeeded in keeping his temper.

Mark felt that the profession of Brother Anselm lost some of its dignity by the absence of Brother George and Brother Birinus, the only other professed members of the Order apart from Father Burrowes himself.  It struck him as slightly ludicrous that a few young novices and postulants should represent the venerable choir-monks whom one pictured at such a ceremony from one’s reading of the Rule of St. Benedict.  Moreover, Father Burrowes never presented himself to Mark’s imagination as an authentic abbot.  Nor indeed was he such.  Malford Abbey was a courtesy title, and such monastic euphemisms as the Abbot’s Parlour and the Abbot’s Lodgings to describe the matchboarded apartments sacred to the Father Superior, while they might please such ecclesiastical enthusiasts as Brother Raymond, appealed to Mark as pretentious and somewhat silly.  In fact, if it had not been for the presence of the Bishop of Alberta in cope and mitre Mark would have found it hard, when after Terce the brethren assembled in the Chapter-room to hear Brother Anselm make his final petition, to believe in the reality of what was happening, to believe, when Brother Anselm in reply to the Father Superior’s exhortation chose the white cowl and scapular (which in the Order of St. George differentiated the professed monk from the novice) and rejected the suit of dittos belonging to his worldly condition, that he was passing through moments of greater spiritual importance than any since he was baptized or than any he would pass through before he stood upon the threshold of eternity.