"Exactly." Whittenden walked on in silence for a little way. "Well, what else do you want, Brenton?" he inquired.
"Nothing. My people, however, want a great deal more."
"How do you know?"
"Our ritual."
"Can't you interpret it with any common sense?" The impatience again was manifest.
"Not in common honesty." And Brenton lifted up his chin.
A little laugh came to his companion's lips and eyes.
"Why not?" he queried. "You don't expect our public schools to abandon the Aeneid and Homer, because they don't consider the old mythologies accurate history. You don't expect to give up the best of Hafiz and Omar, because you also come in contact with the worst of them. We'd be poorer, all our lives, by just so much. In the same way, why can't you take the best of our theologies as fact and love it, and, at the same time, keep a certain respect for the rest of them that you don't believe, the sort of respect you give an aged ancestor, a respect for what they have been to the world at large, not for what they are now to you? Belief, in the last analysis, is nothing but well-applied common sense."
It was a long time before either of the men spoke again. In the end, Whittenden broke the silence.
"Brenton, I'd have given a good deal to have known your parents," he said.