He
had a red cord round his shaggy black hat. His face was like a
parroquet's, with small, beady eyes full of an unintellectual
sharpness. His plump body suggested this world, and his whole
demeanor, the movements of his dimpled, dirty hands, and of his
protruding lips, the attitude of his extended legs, the pose of his
coarse shoulders, seemed hostile to things mystical. He munched an
ice, and swallowed hasty draughts of iced water, talking the while
with a sort of gluttonous vivacity. Artois looked at him and heard,
with his imagination, the sound of the bell at the Elevation, and saw
the bowed heads of the crouching worshippers. The irony of life, that
is the deepest mystery of life, came upon him like the wave of some
Polar sea. He looked up at the gilded angels, then dropped his eyes
and saw what he had come to see.
Slowly threading her way through the increasing throng, came the old
woman whom he had watched so often and by whom he had been watched.
To-night she had on her summer dress, a respectable, rather shiny gown
of grayish mauve, a bonnet edged with white ribbon, a pair of white
thread gloves.
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