f emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood
in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an
innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts.
The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed
tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread,
wave-like, over him, at once reposeful and yearning, was full of
infantile purity and sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before
what wellsprings of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism,
his nature contained.

"We were speaking of our respective religions," he heard Celia say, as
imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.

"Yes," he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back
hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish
to lie there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her
under-chin as well, was very strong upon him. "Yes?" he repeated.

"I cannot talk to you like that," she said; and he sat up again
shamefacedly.

"Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago," he
faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might
be annoyed began to oppress him.

"Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That
entitles you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a
Catholic."

Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible--was there
coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? "Yes--I
know," he murmured.

"But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its
symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said--you
cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is
in. Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things
I like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews
threw them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and
poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.
The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't
been for those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and
dirt and the thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier
stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself
appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with
them and listen to them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit;
and