He had encountered at one of the reunions in the famous Concourt grenier, Henry James and also Joris-Karel Huysmans, whose names in baptism were Charles Marie-George. For this misanthropic writer he had shown such a preference that he attracted the attention of his idol and was invited to call upon him at his home in the rue de Sèvres on the rive gauche. A friendship began which greatly influenced the development of the younger man's character. His father had been what is facetiously called a "hickory" Catholic. He went to church when the spirit moved him. Yet, Irish-like, he never let the lustral week preceding Easter pass without confessing and communicating, usually going to the Trinity church on the boulevard Malsherbes, where he found a friend in a little Irish priest long stationed there for the convenience and edification of English-speaking residents. But Ulick's mother had been a High Church Episcopalian, and while she was not a fervent church woman she had consented to the baptism of her sons in the Roman Catholic religion. It is not so far away from my faith, she had told her fashionable English friends when they remonstrated with her over this backsliding from the principles of the Church of England. She, too, lacked true moral fibre though her association with her characterless husband may have been the chief contributing cause. Ulick, however, was not of the temperament religious. He believed, of course, in a deity, an immanent deity; his was a pleasing sort of personal pantheism. Oswald was become a Manichean, a devil-worshipper. He did not repudiate the authority of the Church. But, then, Oswald drank absinthe, and long before that artists' apotheosis, he had hitched his artistic wagon to the saturnine canvases of Paul Cézanne. Ulick, on the contrary, never indulged in parti-pris. He was born, if such a thing were possible, with an indifferent temperament concerning any particular religion. All gods were divine to him, from the fetish of a South-Sea islander to the sublime doctrine of transubstantiation. He would have agreed with Baudelaire that it is neither permissible nor prudent to mock at any idol. A deity may have once made its abode in the wood or stone. Not cynical, Ulick was never convinced that any act of his could alter the inflexible law of causality. He had absorbed from Taine his deterministic leaning, luckily tempered by a sensible toleration. Whatever God is, he certainly can't exist outside of my brain-cells, argued Ulick. Each man creates a god after his own image. If I stop thinking of my particular deity-concept then he ceases to exist--for me; and that is the history of every god, every religion. All the rest is theology. Mother Church with her magnificent ceremonial, her liturgy, music, painting, sculpture, above all, architecture--for him, Gothic--appealed to his imagination, historic and aesthetic. Ulick was principally aesthetic; morals played a minor rôle in his existence.