Upon the day the painters went in Quinney marched out and married his Susan. *CHAPTER III* *THE PLEASANT LAND OF FRANCE* *I* They crossed to Saint Malo two days after the wedding. The groom was horribly sea-sick; the bride, a capital sailor, ministered to him faithfully. This experience is recorded, because it opened Joe’s eyes to the fact that physical infirmity is a serious disability. He had never been "outed," as he expressed it, before. And it was humiliating to reflect that his small Susan could confront without a qualm wild waves when he lay prostrate, limp in mind and body, capable only of cursing Tomlin, who had dispatched him upon this perilous enterprise. He was not too well pleased when Susan kissed his clammy brow and whispered, "Oh, Joe, I do love to look after you." Somehow he had never contemplated her looking after him. His very gorge rose at the thought of his inferiority. Twenty-four hours afterwards he felt himself again, the better perhaps for the upheaval, but the memory of what he had suffered remained. He told himself (and Susan) that he would be satisfied with establishing himself in London. New York and Paris could go hang! They wandered about Saint Malo, criticizing with entire candour everything they beheld. Susan aired her French; the true Briton expressed a preference for his own honest tongue. The Cathedral aroused certain enthusiasms tempered by disgust at the tawdry embellishments of the interior. Susan, however, was impressed by the kneeling men and women, who wandered in and out at all hours. She stared at their weather-beaten faces uplifted in supplication to some unknown saint. She became sensible of an emotion passing from them to her, a desire to kneel with them, to share, so to speak, the graces and benedictions obviously bestowed upon them. For the first time in her life she realized that religion may be more than an act of allegiance to God. These simple folk, workers all of them, could spare five minutes out of a busy morning to pray. Her own prayers never varied. Night and morning she repeated piously the formulas learned at her mother’s knee. Upon Sundays she followed more or less attentively the fine liturgy of the Church of England. Naturally intelligent and supremely sympathetic, she could not doubt that prayer meant more to these Papists than to her, something vital, something absolutely necessary. She glanced at her husband’s face, wondering whether he shared her thoughts. Joe was worshipping after his own fashion the Gothic architecture of the nave, and favourably contrasting it with the transepts. She touched his arm timidly. "Would it be wicked, Joe, to kneel down here?" Joe stared at her whimsically. "Do you want to?" he asked. "Ye-es." "Well, then, do it. You ain’t going to pray to that?" He indicated a graven image, atrociously bedizened in crude blue and silver tinsel.