inal became the offices of the "Red Pope";
the embassies, huge seminaries; even the Vatican itself, with the
exception of the upper floor, had become the abode of the Sacred
College, who surrounded the Supreme Pontiff as stars their sun.

It was an extraordinary city, said antiquarians--the one living example
of the old days. Here were to be seen the ancient inconveniences, the
insanitary horrors, the incarnation of a world given over to dreaming.
The old Church pomp was back, too; the cardinals drove again in gilt
coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went
through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light
of lanterns. A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised
world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression
was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the
poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take
for granted that superstition and progress were irreconcilable enemies.

Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove
from the volor station outside the People's Gate, of the old peasant
dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn
gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and
horses--strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It
had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest
of the world proclaimed--human, and therefore careless and
individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than
those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.

The room in which he sat now by the window with shading blinds, for the
sun was already hot, seemed to revert back even further than to a
century-and-a-half. The old damask and gilding that he had expected was
gone, and its absence gave the impression of great severity. There was a
wide deal table running the length of the room, with upright wooden arm
chairs set against it; the floor was red-tiled, with strips of matting
for the feet, the white, distempered walls had only a couple of old
pictures hung upon them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood
on a little altar by the further door. There was no more furniture than
that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which
stood a typewriter. That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he
wondered at it.

He finished the last drop of coffee in the thick-rimme