cathedral, like a grey-purple sea-urchin with
many spines, on the one side, the ornamental grass-plots and flower beds
on the other: the big shops going all along the further strands, all
round: and the endless restless nervous drift of a north Italian crowd,
so nervous, so twitchy; nervous and twitchy as the slipping past of
the little yellow tram-cars; it all affected him with a sense of
strangeness, nervousness, and approaching winter. It struck him the
people were afraid of themselves: afraid of their own souls, and that
which was in their own souls.

Turning up the broad steps of the cathedral, he entered the famous
building. The sky had cleared, and the freshened light shone coloured in
living tablets round the wonderful, towering, rose-hearted dusk of the
great church. At some altars lights flickered uneasily. At some unseen
side altar mass was going on, and a strange ragged music fluttered
out on the incense-dusk of the great and lofty interior, which was all
shadow, all shadow, hung round with jewel tablets of light. Particularly
beautiful the great east bay, above the great altar. And all the time,
over the big-patterned marble floor, the faint click and rustle of feet
coming and going, coming and going, like shallow uneasy water rustled
back and forth in a trough. A white dog trotted pale through the
under-dusk, over the pale, big-patterned floor. Aaron came to the side
altar where mass was going on, candles ruddily wavering. There was a
small cluster of kneeling women--a ragged handful of on-looking men--and
people wandering up and wandering away, young women with neatly dressed
black hair, and shawls, but without hats; fine young women in very high
heels; young men with nothing to do; ragged men with nothing to do.
All strayed faintly clicking over the slabbed floor, and glanced at the
flickering altar where the white-surpliced boys were curtseying and
the white-and-gold priest bowing, his hands over his breast, in the
candle-light. All strayed, glanced, lingered, and strayed away again, as
if the spectacle were not sufficiently holding. The bell chimed for the
elevation of the Host. But the thin trickle of people trickled the
same, uneasily, over the slabbed floor of the vastly-upreaching
shadow-foliaged cathedral.

The smell of incense in his nostrils, Aaron went out again by a side
door, and began to walk along the pavements of the cathedral square,
looking at the shops. Some were closed, and had littl