been womanish in its plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness which had the effect of being permitted, conceded.  He had the long thin nose which looked as if, for preference, it would be for ever thrust among the pages of the Fathers; and anyone might observe the width of his mouth without perhaps detecting the patience and decision of the upper lip.  The indignity of spectacles he did not yet wear, but it hovered over him; it was indispensable to his personality in the long run.  In figure he was indifferently tall and thin and stooping, made to pass unobservedly along a pavement, or with the directness of humble but important business among crowds.  At Oxford he had interested some of his friends and worried others by wistful inclinations toward the shelter of that Mother Church which bids her children be at rest and leave to her the responsibility.  Lindsay, with his robust sense of a right to exist on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and decent animal, under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner, was among those who observed his waverings without prejudice, or anything but an affectionate solicitude that whichever way Arnold went he should find the satisfactions he sought.  The conviction that settled the matter was accidental, the work of a moment, a free instinct and a thing made with hands—­the dead Shelley where the sea threw him and the sculptor fixed him, under his memorial dome in the gardens of University College.  Here one leafy afternoon Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head in some confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might claim the vague tribute of his spirit.  Then fell the flash by which he saw, deeply concealed in his bosom and disguised with a host of spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view.  The discovery worked upon him so that he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept upon his devotions.  In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view, as far from him as his will would carry, and walked away in another direction from which, if he turned his head, he could see the Church of Rome sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in her skirts, looking mournfully after him.  He had been a priest of the Clarke Mission to Calcutta, a “Clarke Brother,” six years when he stood in the door of Ahsing’s little shop in Bentinck street while Lindsay explained to Ahsing his objection to patent-leather toe caps; six years which had not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully admitted, he had recognised the facts and lowered his personal hopes of achievement—­lowered them with a heroism which took account of himself as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired