But Félise, although a good Catholic in her very simple way, and anxious to win favour by observance of the rules of the solitary household, was wicked enough to wish that her aunt were not quite so pious. In religious matters a wide latitudinarianism prevailed at the Hôtel des Grottes. There, with a serene conscience, one could eat meat on Fridays and crack a mild joke at the expense of the good Saint Peter. But neither forbidden flesh nor jocularity on any subject, let alone on a saint’s minor foibles, mitigated the austerities of the perky, wind-swept little house at Chartres. No wonder, thought Félise, Aunt Clothilde had married off a regiment of daughters—four to be exact; it had been an easy matter; she herself would have married any caricature of a man rather than spend her life in an atmosphere so rarefied and so depressing. She pitied her cousins, although, according to her Aunt Clothilde’s pragmatical account, they were all doing splendidly and had innumerable babies. By the end of the first week of her visit, she consolidated an intense dislike to Chartres and everything in it, especially the Cathedral. Now, it may be thought that any one who can shake the fist of disapprobation at the Cathedral of Chartres, is beyond the pale of human sympathy. But when you are dragged relentlessly thither in the icy dark of every winter morning, and the bitter gloom of every winter evening, to say nothing of sporadic attendances during the daytime, you may be pardoned if your æsthetic perceptions are obscured by the sense of outrage inflicted on your personal comfort. To many generations of men the Cathedral has been a symbol of glories, revelations and eternities. In such slanting shafts of light, mystically hued, the Grail might have been made manifest, the Sacred Dove might have glided down to the Head of the Holy One. . . . But what need to tell of its spiritual wonders and of its mystery, the heart of which it is given to every suffering man to pluck out according to his own soul’s needs? It was a little tragedy that to poor Félise the Cathedral symbolised nothing but an overwhelming tyranny. She hated every stone of it, as much as she hated every shiny plank and every polished chair in her aunt’s frigid salon. Even the streets of Chartres repelled her by their bleakness. They lacked the smiling homeliness of Brantôme; and the whole place was flatter than the Sahara. She sighed for the rocks and hills of Périgord.