THE MORNING WATCH
163
probably praying all right,
and
even
if
he isn't I've got no right to
look at him like
this
and--
With this, something he could not quite remember, which
seemed to be prodding at the edges of
his
thought, came abruptly
clear. He remembered that he had started looking at Claude, and
speculating with mistrust about the quality of his praying, because
he himself had done something, without affectation, which might
easily be misunderstood to
be
affected. He could not quite understand
it but he was in some ignoble way trying to put off onto Claude some–
thing that was wrong with himself, or even worse, was assuming that
Claude was doing wrongly what he knew he himself had not done
wrongly; and worse even than that, he had so wandered and so lost
himself in speculating about the weakness of another that he had
degraded and lost,his own moment of contrition, and had forgotten
the very sin for which he was contrite, in committing still another
sin of much the same kind. But now, although he ,could see the
fIrst
sin, and the moment of contrition, and the second sin, quite clearly,
they formed something more like a picture than a feeling, and there
were too many things in the picture for
him
to look at anyone of them
really closely. He felt shame and a sort of astonishment. He won–
dered whether he would ever learn, from committing one sin, how not
to commit another of the same sort even in the very moment of
repenting it; and he felt that it was strange, and terrible, that re–
pentance so deep and real as he knew that his ,had been, could be
so fleeting. He felt deeply sorry and was filled with self-dislike as
he saw what he had done, but he knew that the feeling was of a much
shallower kind than that
in
which, without foreseeing it, he had
struck his breast so hard. He thought of Jesus suffering on the Cross,
but the deep and truest contrition was not restored; he looked again at
Claude's unpromising head, and felt a mysterious sadness, which
he could not quite understand, for whatever was imperfect and in–
competent: Claude; poor little Dillon Prince, with his square-bobbed
tow hair and his pink lashless eyes, forever crying or just over crying
or just about to cry; a hen, with a
wry
neck which could never be
straightened, standing as
if
shyly to herself in one comer of the
chicken run, with one wing hunched; his own imperfect and in–
continent mind and spirit; and again of Jesus upon the Cross, suf–
fering and dying that all such imperfections might be made whole,
