e.

The priest walked on again. Brother Archangias sometimes aroused strange
scruples in his mind. With his vulgarity and coarseness the Brother
seemed to him the true man of God, free from earthly ties, submissive in
all to Heaven's will, humble, blunt, ready to shower abuse upon sin. He,
the priest, would then feel despair at his inability to rid himself
more completely of his body; he regretted that he was not ugly, unclean,
covered with vermin like some of the saints. Whenever the Brother had
wounded him by some words of excessive coarseness, or by some over-hasty
churlishness, he would blame himself for his refinement, his innate
shrinking, as if these were really faults. Ought he not to be dead to
all the weaknesses of this world? And this time also he smiled sadly as
he thought how near he had been to losing his temper at the Brother's
roughly put lesson. It was pride, it seemed to him, seeking to work his
perdition by making him despise the lowly. However, in spite of himself,
he felt relieved at being alone again, at being able to walk on gently,
reading his breviary, free at last from the grating voice that had
disturbed his dream of heavenly love.

VI

The road wound on between fallen rocks, among which the peasants had
succeeded here and there in reclaiming six or seven yards of chalky
soil, planted with old olive trees. Under the priest's feet the dust in
the deep ruts crackled lightly like snow. At times, as he felt a warmer
puff upon his face, he would raise his eyes from his book, as if to seek
whence came this soft caress; but his gaze was vacant, straying without
perception over the glowing horizon, over the twisted outlines of that
passion-breathing landscape as it stretched out in the sun before him,
dry, barren, despairing of the fertilisation for which it longed. And
he would lower his hat over his forehead to protect himself against
the warm breeze and tranquilly resume his reading, his cassock raising
behind him a cloudlet of dust which rolled along the surface of the
road.

'Good morning, Monsieur le Cure,' a passing peasant said to him.

Sounds of digging alongside the cultivated strips of ground again
roused him from his abstraction. He turned his head and perceived big
knotty-limbed old men greeting him from among the vines. The Artauds
were eagerly satisfying their passion for the soil, in the sun's full
blaze. Sweating brows appeared from behind the bushes, heaving chests
were s