Perhaps this was enough in itself to send her
dramatic impulse to another focus, and the strangeness of the adventure
was a very thing she would delight in. Whatever may be said about it,
while yet the hideousness of the conception and display of a woman's
natural passion for the man Christ Jesus was receding from Arnold's mind
before the exquisite charm and faithfulness of the worshipping
Magdalene, he became aware that in some special way he sat judging and
pitying her. She had hardly lifted her eyes to him twice, yet it was he,
intimately he, who responded, as if from afar off, to the touch of her
infinite solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of her love. As
he watched and knew his lips tightened and his face paled with the throb
of his own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his
brotherhood and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of how
the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering and
transported thus. The poverty of the play faded out; he became almost
unaware of the pinchbeck and the fustian of Patullo's invention and its
insufferable mixture with the fabric of which every thread was precious
beyond imagination.
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