Matins and the church-and-chapel aside

Meaning

The Delle narrator fears sleeping through matins as a figure for missing his visitor’s teaching. The religious word does not establish that the host lives in a monastery. Earlier, his wife’s interruption provokes a sardonic church-and-chapel aside, casting a domestic interruption into a religious architectural saying. Both details give the narrator a fallible and irritated voice rather than presenting an impersonal treatise. Their figurative meanings matter because taking them literally would distort the scene’s setting and the roles of its participants.