very foundation seemed
fatally injured, and yet he felt a stubborn desire still to try to save
the edifice. He was filled with a sorer sense of wrong than he had ever
known, or than he had supposed it possible he should know. To accept
his injury and walk away without looking behind him was a stretch of
good-nature of which he found himself incapable. He looked behind him
intently and continually, and what he saw there did not assuage his
resentment. He saw himself trustful, generous, liberal, patient, easy,
pocketing frequent irritation and furnishing unlimited modesty. To have
eaten humble pie, to have been snubbed and patronized and satirized and
have consented to take it as one of the conditions of the bargain--to
have done this, and done it all for nothing, surely gave one a right to
protest. And to be turned off because one was a commercial person! As if
he had ever talked or dreamt of the commercial since his connection with
the Bellegardes began--as if he had made the least circumstance of the
commercial--as if he would not have consented to confound the commercial
fifty times a day, if it might have increased by a hair's breadth the
chance of the Bellegardes' not playing him a trick! Granted that being
commercial was fair ground for having a trick played upon one, how
little they knew about the class so designed and its enterprising way
of not standing upon trifles! It was in the light of his injury that the
weight of Newman's past endurance seemed so heavy; his actual irritation
had not been so great, merged as it was in his vision of the cloudless
blue that overarched his immediate wooing. But now his sense of outrage
was deep, rancorous, and ever present; he felt that he was a good fellow
wronged. As for Madame de Cintre's conduct, it struck him with a kind
of awe, and the fact that he was powerless to understand it or feel
the reality of its motives only deepened the force with which he had
attached himself to her. He had never let the fact of her Catholicism
trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express
a mistrust of the form in which her religious feelings had moulded
themselves would have seemed to him on his own part a rather pretentious
affectation of Protestant zeal. If such superb white flowers as that
could bloom in Catholic soil, the soil was not insalubrious. But it was
one thing to be a Catholic, and another to turn nun--on your hand!
There was something lugubriously comic