Footsteps

I am reading a book that I had read once before a few years ago, The Razor’s Edge (Somerset Maugham):

“I couldn’t make head or tail of him. When wine had loosened his tongue and he spoke of the Ineffable, he shed the rough obscene language that he ordinarily used, like the grimy overalls he wore in the mine, and he was well spoken and even eloquent. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t sincere. I don’t know how it occurred to me, but I got the idea somehow that he’d taken that hard, brutal labour of the mine to mortify his flesh. I thought he hated that great, uncouth body of his and wanted to torture it and that his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will against – oh, I don’t know what’d call it – against deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him.”