After dinner, he retired into the parlour, continuing in the same state of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to her. Then he went to the book-shelf and took down books to look at, that she had scarcely glanced over. He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations in old missals, and then over a book on paintings in churches: Italian, English, French and German. He had, when he was sixteen, discovered a Roman Catholic bookshop where he could find such things. He turned the leaves in absorption, absorbed in looking, not thinking. He was like a man whose eyes were in his chest, she said of him later. She came to look at the things with him. Half they fascinated her. She was puzzled, interested, and antagonistic. It was when she came to pictures of the Pietà that she burst out. “I do think they’re loathsome,” she cried. “What?” he said, surprised, abstracted. “Those bodies with slits in them, posing to be worshipped.” “You see, it means the Sacraments, the Bread,” he said slowly. “Does it,” she cried. “Then it’s worse. _I_ don’t want to see your chest slit, nor to eat your dead body, even if you offer it to me. Can’t you see it’s horrible?” “It isn’t me, it’s Christ.” “What if it is, it’s you! And it’s horrible, you wallowing in your own dead body, and thinking of eating it in the Sacrament.” “You’ve to take it for what it means.” “It means your human body put up to be slit and killed and then worshipped—what else?” They lapsed into silence. His soul grew angry and aloof. “And I think that Lamb in Church,” she said, “is the biggest joke in the parish——” She burst into a “Pouf” of ridiculing laughter. “It might be, to those that see nothing in it,” he said. “You know it’s the symbol of Christ, of His innocence and sacrifice.” “Whatever it means, it’s a _lamb,_” she said. “And I like lambs too much to treat them as if they had to mean something. As for the Christmas-tree flag—no——” And again she poufed with mockery. “It’s because you don’t know anything,” he said violently, harshly. “Laugh at what you know, not at what you don’t know.” “What don’t I know?” “What things mean.” “And what does it mean?” He was reluctant to answer her. He found it difficult. “_What_ does it mean?” she insisted. “It means the triumph of the Resurrection.” She hesitated, baffled, a fear came upon her. What were these things? Something dark and powerful seemed to extend before her. Was it wonderful after all? But no—she refused it. “Whatever it may pretend to mean, what it _is_ is a silly absurd toy-lamb with a Christmas-tree flag ledged on its paw—and if it wants to mean anything else, it must look different from that.”