Already, in this Catholic country, she had been jarred and repelled on all
sides. Yet she found herself living with two people for whom Catholicism
was not indeed a personal faith--she could not think of that side of it
without indignation--but a thing to be passionately admired and praised,
like art, or music, or scenery. You might believe nothing, and yet write
pages and pages in glorification of the Pope and the Mass, and in contempt
of everything else!--in excuse too of every kind of tyranny so long as it
served the Papacy and 'the Church.'
She leaned out to the sunset, remembering sentence after sentence from the
talk on the terrace--hating or combating them all.
Yet all the time a new excitement invaded her. For the man who had spoken
thus was, in a sense, not a mere stranger to her. Somewhere in his being
must be the capacity for those thoughts and feelings that had touched her
so deeply in his book--for that magical insight and sweetness--
Ah!--perhaps she had not understood his book--no more than she understood
him now. The sense of her own ignorance oppressed her--and of all that
_might_ be said, with regard apparently to anything whatever. Was there
nothing quite true--quite certain--in the world?
So the girl's intense and simple nature entered like all its fellows, upon
the old inevitable struggle.
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