Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/125

 women, one saw dining where food was best in Rome, Venice, Paris, New York, and the Bohemian Cellar of Congress. Or the dour Protestants against Rome. St. Cecilia's Cathedral, largest and richest in Congress, was therefore held to be the most beautiful, even by those who worshiped in stark Protestant structures. Clem had accepted this celebration of St. Cecilia's as unarguable. The grey wooden box with the cone on top where he had gone to Sunday school now was a large grey stone box with a higher cone set on a pedestal, but it still did not approach St. Cecilia's in grandeur or height, though now he knew that the twin gothic spires of the Cathedral, or New York's St. Patrick's, were clumsy copies of wonders he had seen.

The Dome of St. Peter's, embraced by a semicircle of columns, two arms curved in adoration of the marvels therein, Michelangelo giants looming majestic and remote within their sepia lines, surveying the comings and goings of the pious, blessed by a bored ecclesiastical hand while, in a choir stall, a singsong chanter paused to suck a Sicilian orange.

Or within San Marco, where Venetian sunlight tantalized curiosity with tentative high lights on golden moldings and dark fresco saints.

Or Chartres. Name all the precious jewels and still not suggest the breath-taking glow of its windows. Or their miraculous patterns. Or of its two spires, the oldest growing from the core of the earth pointing in its line the path to Heaven. And the sculptures. How could the classic line have found its way through the Dark Ages to that Touraine plain?

Art, wealth, Latin, and incense certainly were dramatically more conducive to mystical acceptance of man's poor lot than the bleak austerity of the Reformation. However, for him any Sabbath edifice, Protestant or Catholic, was a barricade between his mother and himself.

One Sunday he could not erase his mother's gaze as she left for church alone. He knew what it would have meant to have her son beside her in full view of the Lutheran congregation. At the studio, trying to draw her in Sunday dress as a recompensing gift, he was horrified to discover he could not remember her, only a reproachful gaze, in composite the expression of Congress looking at him.

"Fine," he said to Lucy, "we'll plan on next Sunday if it's a sunny day. I'll come for you." Rh