believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ...
something the same as God...." He could not say it all. But it
communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.

They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.
He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that
to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she
was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and
trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found
pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind
region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth
in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such
fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.

At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they
made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it
travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of
Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of
coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since
there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their
minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church
like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to God, and which is
doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than
precious stones.

So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women
are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern
women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of
languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North
was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their
bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such
sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him
for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so
sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme
passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would
provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he
had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen
during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been,
he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising
things than he was ordinarily. But henc