The interior was plain, even ugly.  The walls were painted a hideous drab.  The stone floor was covered with small, hard, straw-bottomed chairs and narrow wooden forms for the patient knees of worshippers.  In the front were two rows of private chairs, with velvet cushions of various brilliant hues and velvet-covered rails.  On the left was a high stone pulpit.  The altar, beyond its mean black and gold railing, was dingy and forlorn.  On it there was a tiny gold cross with a gold statuette of Christ hanging, surmounted by a canopy with four pillars, which looked as if made of some unwholesome sweetmeat.  Long candles of blue and gold and bouquets of dusty artificial flowers flanked it.  Behind it, in a round niche, stood a painted figure of Christ holding a book.  The two adjacent side chapels had domed roofs representing the firmament.  Beneath the pulpit stood a small harmonium.  At the opposite end of the church was a high gallery holding more chairs.  The mean, featureless windows were filled with glass half white, half staring red dotted with yellow crosses.  Round the walls were reliefs of the fourteen stations of the Cross in white plaster on a gilt ground framed in grey marble.  From the roof hung vulgar glass chandeliers with ropes tied with faded pink ribands.  Several frightful plaster statues daubed with scarlet and chocolate brown stood under the windows, which were protected with brown woollen curtains.  Close to the entrance were a receptacle for holy water in the form of a shell, and a confessional of stone flanked by boxes, one of which bore the words, “Graces obtenues,” the other, “Demandes,” and a card on which was printed, “Litanies en honneur de Saint Antoine de Padoue.”

There was nothing to please the eye, nothing to appeal to the senses.  There was not even the mystery which shrouds and softens, for the sunshine streamed in through the white glass of the windows, revealing, even emphasising, as if with deliberate cruelty, the cheap finery, the tarnished velvet, the crude colours, the meretricious gestures and poses of the plaster saints.  Yet as Domini touched her forehead and breast with holy water, and knelt for a moment on the stone floor, she was conscious that this rather pitiful house of God moved her to an emotion she had not felt in the great and beautiful churches to which she was accustomed in England and on the Continent.  Through the windows she saw the outlines of palm leaves vibrating in the breeze; African fingers, feeling, with a sort of fluttering suspicion, if not enmity, round the heart of this intruding religion, which had wandered hither from some distant place, and, stayed, confronting the burning glance of the desert.  Bold, little, humble church!  Domini knew that she would love it.  But she did not know then how much.