Two Solitudes by Hugh Maclennan

Marius’ hand to the desk. This was certainly heresy, suggesting that the motives of a priest of God were no better than those of a politician. He had for some time suspected that his father was a free-thinker. His fondness for the English was a part of it. So were the convolutions of his private life. Now Marius felt he had absolute proof that his father wasalso a liar. He lacked the courage to say openly what he believed, escaping the consequences of his heresy by rendering lip-service and going to church occasionally and keeping a pew. His political actions proved him a traitor to his race. Now this book proved him a traitor to his religion as well.
    In sudden impatience Marius put both hands to the pigeon-holes at the back of the desk and began to turn them out. He was absorbed in his search until he thought he heard a noise. He looked up with a start, heard nothing, and then began pushing the papers and letters back in a frantic hurry. With a swift movement he closed the desk and locked it, slipped the key back into the drawer where he had found it, and stood up, tense and with moist palms. He went to the library door, opened it and listened carefully. There was no sound. He swore under his breath and closed the door again, moving softly back into the room. Then he let out a deep breath and stood there with his hands in his pockets, not moving.
    He felt decidedly annoyed because he had found no money. It was as though his father had deliberately fooled him. Nearly always there was money somewhere in that desk. He had seen it since he was a child whenever he had asked for spending-money; sometimes there was as much as a hundred dollars in various sized bills. His father held five hundred dollars in trust for him, a legacy from his own mother. Until his twenty-first birthday he could not legally claim it, but he needed money now, badly, and he saw no reason not to borrow against the five hundred.
    Part of Marius’ anger was caused by the knowledge that his father was naturally generous with money. By French standards, he was even reckless with it. Athanase would have given him any amount had he asked for it, but to ask his father for anything was something Marius could not bring himself to do.
    His breathing quieted and he went again to the window. A feeling of excitement, mixed strangely with sadness and pleasure, passed through him like a knife as he thought of his discovery. His father was a heretic. It gave him a tremendous sense of vindication. His father had never given regard to anyone’s feelings but his own. Now he would ultimately be found out, and then the world would know which of them was right, which one had suffered unjustly.
    He turned his head to listen but there was still no sound in the house. With a quickening in his blood he dropped on his knees before the bookcase beside his father’s desk. He let his hand move over a row of slim volumes on the bottom shelf. They were art books his father had brought from Paris years ago; he had first discovered their presence in the house when he was thirteen. His hand found the volume he wanted without searching, and he went back to the window with it. His fingers trembled as he opened the pages.
    Nude women gleamed from the smooth paper. He turned the pages and there were more nude women in reproductions of paintings by Titian, Correggio, Botticelli, Rubens and Ingres. As he looked at the lovely bodies he was both troubled and fascinated by his thoughts. These were the nearest he had ever come to the sight of a woman naked. So the forms lost individuality as conceived by the painters and became what he made them. They signified only the female being he did not know, the being which was beautiful and dangerous and at the core of sin. His fingers shook as he turned the pages.
    Then, as always happened when he opened the book, he became afraid the pages would be marked by his fingers. He dreaded that his father would some day know how often he looked at