The effect of the letter upon him, however, had been uncanny. While he read he was again in Detroit. His sensations were almost exactly those which he always felt as he entered the Presbyterian church with his father and mother—not as he sat down in the accustomed pew, but as he passed through the crowded little vestibule where bald, smug elders and bearded, smug deacons and severe-faced chairwomen of missionary boards held their court before the service, shaking hands with all who entered with that religious affability, that hushed and somber and severe welcome, which strove to counterfeit open-heartedness.... It was that vestibule, and not the church, not the sermon, not the hymns nor the songs, which personified Kendall’s religion and what his religion meant.... He had grown up among those elders and deacons and chairwomen, and he knew them—in the church. It was incomprehensible to him that they could have any interests or activities outside the church. The practice of religion in that place seemed to him to be the sole occupations of their lives, and when he met one of them in the secular world of a week-day in the act of selling goods, or of handling money in a bank, or of anything else which savored of business and earning a living, Ken had the sort of feeling one has when he detects a person in something unusual and a bit discreditable. Why, those persons _were_ the church!... And the thoughts of those persons were the thoughts of Kendall’s home world, thoughts among which he had been raised from babyhood.... So, as he read, he was transported to that vestibule—and that vestibule’s occupants smugly set the stain of guilt upon him and rolled eyes of horror at Andree.... He had been seeing Paris with something that approximated the eyes of Paris—now he was seeing it with the eyes of the vestibule of the Presbyterian church. Before him stretched the magnificent avenue, crowded, as dusk descended, with pleasure-seeking Parisians: he regarded it—regarded it as a spectator, an utter outsider. It was as if he looked at the scene from a window in the Presbyterian church. The two worlds stood starkly facing each other, challenging each other—the civilization that was Paris and the civilization that had its expression in the occupants of the church vestibule. Kendall saw, with something very like to fear, that they could not be reconciled, that neither contained a starting-point which would lead to understanding of the other.... And yet he, springing from the one, felt that he understood both. He was drawn to the one while the other clung to him tenaciously.