Then, abruptly, pleasure ended. He looked not down at the parked street, as Ellen had looked at first, but up at two groups of statuary newly placed on each side of the main entrance. Here, in broad daylight, fixed eternally and shamefully in marble, were human beings without clothes! He did not blush; his astonishment and incredulity were too deep. After a long stare he withdrew his gaze embarrassed. It was to escape the glaring nudities that he entered the bronze doors, on which were represented various worthies of the Commonwealth. He did not smile at the neatly collared gentlemen whose heads protruded like the heads of turtles; he found them vaguely an assurance of the stability of the world.
Once inside, he felt a measure of confidence. Upon his childlike mind the soaring dome, the painted walls made the same impression which they had made upon the mind of Ellen. He looked longest at the lunettes in a corridor which pictured the early sects and found at last his own. How beautiful was this quiet place and how intolerable the group without! Here, in Moravian, sounding his trombone from the tower, in pious Quakeress preaching to the savage, in Wissahickon mystic at prayer on the hillside, was nothing to hurt Ellen.
For an hour he wandered about, walking on marble stairways and thick rugs and letting his astonished vision rest on masses of color, the green of Penn's rich coat, the Admiral's scarlet robe, the blue sky. He had not known that such colors existed. Suddenly he apprehended dimly the beauty of the world, of trees and streams and the bodies of human beings. But they were all an obstacle between man and God!
He felt with sudden depression his own insignificance. He had seen in all his years no crowds of human beings, had been part of no large body of men, had had a share in no concerted movement. He knew in a general way the history of his State, but he was not of it; he taught the history of his country, but felt no thrill at sight of its flag. He read no daily paper, and in his religious weekly all the news of the world was censored and emasculated.
In the library he stood most astonished and confused. Shelves upon shelves of books, hundreds and thousands of books! He was confounded by their number and by the vastness of the world which they represented; he was embarrassed by the studious silence; he was frightened by the cool black eyes of a young woman behind the desk. To gain a moment's time, he stepped aside to look at an old map and at a framed and valuable proclamation offering ten thousand dollars for the arrest of the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
At last he summoned sufficient courage to ask for "The Early Sects," and was told that it was at present out of the library.
"I wanted it for study," he explained. "I have sent for books from here."
"If you will leave your name and address we'll send it to you."
As he wrote his name on a card, his eye fell upon a row of books at the end of the desk whose bright bindings marked them as the modern works for which he sought. He thought it best to buy copies of his own; he was not a rapid reader and he wished to study them carefully.
"May I copy their names?"