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They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity.
But the pompous austerity of his manners repelled her whenever she thought of broaching the subject, and gradually she saw that she must work out her own problems. Thus, from week to week and month to month, she toiled on, with a slowly dying faith, constantly clambering over obstacles which seemed to stand between her trust and revelation.
A few days had elapsed since Father d'Aigrigny had been so courageously rescued by Gabriel from the popular fury. Three ecclesiastics, wearing black gowns, white bands, and square caps, were walking in the garden with a slow and measured step. The youngest seemed to be about thirty years of age; his countenance was pale, hollow, and impressed with a certain ascetic austerity.
As a part of the programme of inducing the Republicans to support him, a friend of mine who was on the inside of the Republican situation reported to me that it was the opinion in the Republican ranks that the new Governor was too much a professor and doctrinaire; that he was lacking in good-fellowship and companionship; that while the members of the Legislature who had conferred with him had found him open and frank, they thought there was a coldness and an austerity about him which held the Governor aloof and prevented that intimate contact that was so necessary in working out the programme we had outlined.
The product of that simple doctrine is a character of no little vigour and austerity, and one much esteemed by the great masses of men, who are always uneasily conscious of their own weakness in the face of temptation and thus have a sneaking veneration for the man apparently firm, and who are always ready to believe, furthermore, that any man who seems to be having a pleasant time is a rascal and deserving of the fire.
For, if it were so, her prayer was answered. She laid down the crucifix and turned to him. They searched each other with their eyes. She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his. He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity in hers. "Are you not going to take it, then?" he said. "I don't know. Do you realise that you are giving me a very sacred thing?" "I do."
Now it so happened that M. Bredin, when things went well with him, was wont to be filled with a ponderous amiability. It was not often that this took a practical form, though it is on record that in an exuberant moment he once gave a small boy a halfpenny. More frequently it merely led him to soften the porcine austerity of his demeanour.
Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan austerity did much good to the country and to the causes for which they were embattled. But there was one thing they did not do; they did nothing for Shaw himself in the matter of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. His great defect was and is the lack of democratic sentiment.
I became such a sloven, and contracted such an air of austerity, that everybody pronounced me crestfallen; and Gawky returned to town without running any risk from my resentment, which was by this time pretty much cooled, and restrained by prudential reasons so effectually that I never so much as thought of obtaining satisfaction for the injuries he had done me.
They were, therefore, in perfect accord over decoration and furnishing. The only difference I could see between them was that Adrian loved to wallow in the comfort of a club or another person's house, but insisted on elegant austerity in his own home, whereas Doria loved elegant austerity everywhere.
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