Often he had felt a certain tenderness directed towards himself by women and, though impervious to it, he was irritated by the constant need for love which throbbed within them. In his view God had created woman solely in order to tempt man and thereby to test him. She was to be approached with infinite caution and wariness, as a snare. With her parted lips and arms outstretched towards man she was in fact exactly like a trap. The only exception he made was in the case of nuns, whose vows made them harmless. However he was sometimes harsh towards even them, sensing within their captive and contrite hearts that same eternal tenderness which, priest or not, got under his skin. He sensed it in their gaze, more tearful and pious than that of monks; he sensed it in the ecstasy which, in their case of course, was mixed up with sex; their surges of love for Christ infuriated him for being, when all was said and done, purely carnal and female. He could feel this wretched tenderness in their docility, in the gentleness of their voices when they addressed him, in their lowered eyes, in their mournful resignation to his rough reprimands. At the door of the convent when he left, he shook out the skirts of his cassock and lengthened his stride as if fleeing from some danger.

Despite all this, he was determined that his niece, who lived with her mother in a little house nearby, should become a nun. She was a pretty, fun-loving young scatterbrain. Whenever the priest pontificated to her she laughed in his face, and when he was cross she hugged him tight and showered him with kisses. He would automatically try to extricate himself from this embrace which, he had to admit, he found absolutely delightful, awakening within him as it did the paternal instinct lying dormant in every living man.

Often as he walked beside her on the meadow paths he would speak to her of God. She scarcely listened and the joy with which she contemplated instead the sky, the grass, and the flowers was reflected in her eyes. Sometimes she would rush off to try and catch some winged creature, crying as she brought it back, ‘Look, uncle! Isn’t it sweet. Don’t you want to give it a little kiss?’ This need of hers to kiss butterflies and lilac buds made the priest sick. He was both worried and irritated to find even in her that ineradicable tenderness that lurked always in the heart of woman.