That's been put on him, for the trial, even though they gave up wearing those years ago, when the sect wars first began; cassocks made them too conspicuous.
They went out of the courtyard into the road and had scarcely taken twenty steps when they ran across a priest in a woven cassock, who was wending his way homeward.
He perceived at the other end of the room, near a small window with yellow panes decorated with badly kept flower vases, a man seated at a table, and covered with a dilapidated cassock.
The roan was close at hand, and in another instant all would have been safe; but as the figure in the scarlet cassock stepped forward, the Gadfly suddenly wavered and the hand with the pistol sank down.
A long procession of seminarists came in from the college which is under the shadow of that great church, two by two, in black cassocks and short white surplices. Many were tonsured already. Some were quite young.
Finally, when she puton her cassock, the man could not bear the proof that, indeed, she was not wearing anything underneath, as everyone had suspected, and he felt himself marked forever with the white-hot iron of that secret.