Please, we did not understand it either. Rather we did, but wrongly, on the novitiate plane.

thinking of the weary and fruitless novitiate eminent men

Again and again the penitent in his ‘novitiate’ succumbs to obscurely-indicated ‘temptations’:

Even though others had been breaking ground, I had a longer backward reach. After all, I had had a quarter of a century novitiate.

Down and Out in Paris and London, “A Hanging,” “Shooting an Elephant,” The Road to Wigan Pier, and finally Homage to Catalonia, which ends his novitiate.