Bernard shrank a little as if he felt actual pain. He had known her since she had been a little child, yet he had never become used to her cruelties of expression. He was a man more easily disgusted in his aesthetic sensibilities than shocked by the wickedness of a world he knew. To him, God was not only great, but beautiful; Nature, as some theologians maintain, was cruel, evil, hurtful, but she was never coarse, nor foul in his conception, and her beauty appealed to him against his will. So also in his eyes a woman could be sinful, and her sins might seem terrible to him, and yet she herself was to him a woman still, a being delicate, refined, tender even in her wickedness; but a woman who could speak at once keenly and brutally of her marriage reacted upon him as a very ugly or painful sight, or as a very harsh and discordant sound that jars every nerve in the body. "Madam," he said in a low voice, but very quietly and coldly, "I think not that you are in such state of grace as to bear the Cross to your good." Eleanor raised her head and looked at him haughtily, with lids half drooped as her eyes grew hard and keen. "You are not my confessor, sir," she retorted. "For all you know, he may have enjoined upon me a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It is a common penance." For the third time she laughed. "A common penance!" cried the abbot, in a tone of despair. "That is what it has come to in these days. A man kills his neighbour in a quarrel and goes to Jerusalem to purge him of blood, as he would take a physician's draught to cure him of the least of little aches. A pilgrimage is a remedy, as a prayer is a medicine. To repeat the act of contrition so and so often, or to run through a dozen rosaries of an afternoon, is a potion for the sick soul." "Well, what then?" asked the Queen. "What then?" repeated the abbot. "Then there is no faith left in the true meaning of the Crusade--" "That is what I fear," answered Eleanor. "That is why I am begging you to come with us. That is why the King will be unable to command men without you. And yet you will not go." "No," he replied, "I will not." "You have always disappointed me," said the Queen, rising, and employing a weapon to which women usually resort last. "You stand in the front and will not lead, you rouse men to deeds you will not do, you give men ideals in which you do not believe, and then you go back to the peace of your abbey of Clairvaux, and leave men to shift for themselves in danger and need. And if, perhaps, some trusting woman comes to you with overladen heart, you tell her that she is not in a state of grace. It must be easy to be a great man in that way."