Isn't it extraordinary
that a woman so beautiful, so gifted, so enchanting, so intended by
life for life should be taken with the religious idea suddenly? She
has gone mad without doubt. A woman who could do the things that she
could do to pass over to religion, to scapulars, rosaries,
indulgencies! My God! my God!" and he fell back in his armchair, and
did not speak again for a long time. Getting up suddenly, he said,
"If you want to smoke any more there are cigars on the table; I am
going to bed."
"Well, it is hard upon him," Ulick said as he took a cigar; and
lighting his candle, he wandered up the great green staircase by
himself, seeking the room he had been given at the end of one of the
long corridors.
XII
"Did it ever occur to you," Owen said one evening, as the men sat
smoking after dinner, after the servant had brought in the whisky
and seltzer, between eleven and twelve, in that happy hour when the
spirit descends and men and women sitting together are taken with a
desire to communicate the incommunicable part of themselves--"did it
ever occur to you," Owen said, blowing the smoke and sipping his
whisky and seltzer from time to time, "that man is the most
ridiculous animal on the face of this earth?"
"You include women?" Ulick asked.
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