ory
chapel-keeping at Oxford. Here in Burgos, he felt less the elevating
power of faith than the unrelenting and disdainful inevitableness of its
endurance. At Bournemouth, when he experienced the first thrill of
conversion, he had been exultingly aware of a personal friendliness
between himself and God. Here in Burgos he was absorbed into the divine
purpose neither against his will nor his desire, since he was
positively aware of the impotency of his individuality to determine
anything in the presence of omnipotence. He told himself this sense of
inclusion was a sign of the outpouring once more of the grace of God,
but he wished with a half whimsical amusement that the sensation were
rather less like that of being contemptuously swept by a broom into the
main dust-heap. Yet as on the last morning of his stay in Burgos Michael
came away from Mass, he came away curiously fortified by his observation
of the moldy confessionals worn down by the knees of so many penitents.
That much power of impression at least had the individual on this
cathedral.

When Michael lay awake in the train going northward he remembered very
vividly the sense of subordination which in retrospect suddenly seemed
to him to reveal the essential majesty of Spain. The train stopped at
some French station. Their carriage was already full enough, but a
bilious and fussy Frenchman insisted there was still room, and on top of
him broke in a loud-voiced and assertive Englishman with a meek wife. It
was intolerable. Michael, Wedderburn, and Maurice displayed their most
polite obstructiveness, but in the end each of them found himself
upright, stiff-backed and exasperated. Michael thought regretfully of
Spain, and remembered those peasants who shared their crusts, those
peasants with rank skins of wine and flopping turkeys, those peasants
who wrought so inimitably their cigarettes and would sit on the floor of
the carriage rather than disarrange the comfort of the three English
travelers. Michael went off into an uneasy sleep trying to arrange
synthetically his deductions, trying to put Don Quixote and Burgos
Cathedral and the grace of God and subordination and feudalism and
himself into a working theory of life. And just when the theory really
seemed to be shaping itself, he was awakened by the Englishman prodding
his wife.

"What is it, dear?" she murmured.

"Did you pack those collars that were in the other chest of drawers?"

"I think so, dear."