was serenely aware of his own skilled faculty for ordering a dinner.  He looked over the menu card at Christine.  Nobody could possibly tell that she was a professed enemy of society.  “These French women are astounding!” he thought.  He intensely admired her.  He was mad about her.  His bliss was extreme.  He could not keep it within bounds meet for the great world-catastrophe.  He was happy as for quite ten years he had never hoped to be.  Yes, he grieved for Concepcion; but somehow grief could not mingle with nor impair the happiness he felt.  And was not Concepcion lying in the affectionate arms of Queenie Paulle?

Christine, glancing about her contentedly, reverted to one of her leading ideas: 

“Truly, it is very romantic, thy London!”

Chapter 16

THE VIRGIN

Christine went into the oratory of St. Philip at Brompton on a Sunday morning in the following January, dipped her finger into one of the Italian basins at the entrance, and signed herself with the holy water.  She was dressed in black; she had the face of a pretty martyr; her brow was crumpled by the world’s sorrow; she looked and actually was at the moment intensely religious.  She had months earlier chosen the Brompton Oratory for her devotions, partly because of the name of Philip, which had been murmured in accents of affection by her dying mother, and partly because it lay on a direct, comprehensible bus-route from Piccadilly.  You got into the motor-bus opposite the end of the Burlington Arcade, and in about six minutes it dropped you in front of the Oratory; and you could not possibly lose yourself in the topographical intricacies of the unknown city.  Christine never took a taxi except when on business.

The interior was gloomy with the winter forenoon; the broad Renaissance arches showed themselves only faintly above; on every side there were little archipelagos of light made by groups of candles in front of great pale images.  The church was comparatively empty, and most of the people present were kneeling in the chapels; for Christine had purposely come, as she always did, at the slack hour between the seventh and last of the early morning Low Masses and the High Mass at eleven.

She went up the right aisle and stopped before the Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague, a charming and naive little figure about eighteen inches high in a stiff embroidered cloak and a huge symbol upon his curly head.  She had put herself under the protection of the Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague.  She liked him; he was a change from the Virgin; and he stood in the darkest corner of the whole interior, behind the black statue of St. Peter with protruding toe, and within the deep shadow made by the organ-loft overhead.  Also he had a motto in French:  “Plus vous m’honorerez plus je vous favoriserai.”

Christine hesitated, and then left the Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague without even a transient genuflexion.  She was afraid to devote herself to him that morning.