have every church like this. There are lots of folks who'd hate it. They have a right to have some things their way, haven't they?"
"Oh, I didn't think you'd take that side," said Marise, feeling betrayed and longing for a sweeping, exclusive affirmation to match her own. He so often hedged, it seemed to her, wanted to qualify statements. Oh—it came to her with a start—that was another form of truth-telling! He was trying to make his statements express the truth, rather than his feelings!
He now said, judicially, "As far as I personally go, it depends what I'm looking at. If I'm looking at a very fine statue or something that seems really beautiful to me, I want as good a light as possible to see it in. If—if I should ever have any personal happiness in my life, I'd want daylight to see it by. But when it's a question of looking at the interior decoration of the average modern church, why, the more mystery and twilight the better."
This made Marise laugh. He often made her laugh, more than she had ever laughed before. And yet he never told funny stories.
He now went on, "I suppose it depends on your opinion of what there is to see. If you think your imagination can do better for you than reality, of course you want a lot left to it, and plenty of dark corners for it to work in. Just now, it seems to me that reality is so much beyond anything my poor, starved imagination could have done. …"
He did not look at Marise as he spoke. His tone was perfectly matter of fact. She wondered what the other two made out of it. She knew very well what she made out of it.
VII
They were sitting on the terrazza in the evening, with several other people from the pension, having their coffee sociably around the big round table and looking out over the roofs and domes and church-towers of Rome. The conversation had been chit-chat, as was usual during meal-times, and Mr.
