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?”