They said the psalms together, Gobion's sweet voice echoing down the long, dark aisles.
The clergyman felt an instinctive sympathy. He saw that Gobion was feeling to the full the influence of the hour and place, the musical cadence of the verse, and he responded in his turn with a newer sense of the poetry of worship, throwing deep feeling into his voice. It was a keen, æsthetic pleasure to both of them, though the priest felt something more, but it put Gobion on good terms with himself at once. He had roused emotion of a sort, and the rousing seemed to sweep away the contamination of the day.
He bowed low to the distant crucifix on the altar on leaving the building, as a man who had tasted a sweet morsel, with shadowy and pleasant thoughts—the sense of a finer glory.
CHAPTER IV.
THE CAMPAIGN.
When a few unconsidered trifles have been thrown out at score, to a middle-aged business man the world is a bundle of shares and bills receivable. To most young men it is a girl or several girls. For some girls it is a young man. For some other people it is a church, a bar, a coterie—for Yardly Gobion it was himself. Realizing this in every nerve, for the next few weeks he devoted himself to making acquaintances and impressions.
He did no writing beyond his weekly contribution to The Pilgrim, but went abroad and looked around, making himself a niche before he essayed anything further. He managed to get about to one or two rather decent houses, and greatly consolidated his position at the "copy shop." His idea was to keep quiet till Sturtevant came up to town, for he thought that very little could stand against such a combination. Accordingly he had a pleasant time for the next few weeks. His work did not take him more than four hours a day, and now that his circle of acquaintance was so much enlarged there was always plenty of amusement. He could always enjoy the small change of transient emotion by a visit to the church at Pimlico, where in the lonely services he felt (sometimes for nearly an hour) a sorrow at his life and a yearning for goodness.
His mental attitude on these occasions was a strange one, and one only found in people possessing the artistic temperament; for he seemed to stand aloof, and mourn over the grossness of some dear friend; he could detach his mind from his own personality, and feel an awful pity for his own dying soul. Then after these luxurious abandonments, these delightful lapses into religious sentimentality, he would seize on pleasure as a monkey seizes on a nut, finding an added zest in the pursuit of dissipation. One thing in some small degree he noticed, and that was that this alternation of attitude was slightly weakening his powers of taste. The sharpest edge of enjoyment seemed blunted.