Through the central door of the altar-screen I could see the altar cloth which my mother had worked; on the screen were the two angels which had seemed so big to me when I was little, and the dove with a golden halo which had fascinated me long ago. Behind the choir stood the old battered font, where I had been christened myself and stood godmother to so many of the servants’ children. The old priest came out, wearing a cope made of the pall that had covered my father’s coffin, and began to read in the same voice that I had heard all my life⁠—at services held in our house, at Sónya’s christening, at memorial services for my father, and at my mother’s funeral. The same old quavering voice of the deacon rose in the choir; and the same old woman, whom I could remember at every service in that church, crouched by the wall, fixing her streaming eyes on an icon in the choir, pressing her folded fingers against her faded kerchief, and muttering with her toothless gums. And these objects were no longer merely curious to me, merely interesting from old recollections⁠—each had become important and sacred in my eyes and seemed charged with profound meaning.