(I want to write about that rather carefully.) "I said just now that I was getting to feel smaller and smaller.

That's perfectly true, but there was still a little hard lump in the middle that would not break.

Things might have gone crumbling away at me for ever, and I might have got smaller still, but they wouldn't have smashed me.
"Now there were two things that I held on to all this time--my religion and Jenny.

I gave them turns, so to speak, though Jenny was never absent.

When everything religious tasted flat and dull and empty, I thought about Jenny: when things were better--when I had those two or three times I told Father Hildebrand about (...)--I still thought of Jenny, and imagined how splendid it would be when we were both Catholics together and married.