"Ah!" returned Herman smiling. "I often go to church when I am not too busy."
"I hardly supposed that a Pagan was guilty of going to any church where he could not worship Pasht."
"One can worship whatever deity he pleases in whatever temple, I suppose," was his rejoinder. "I'm catholic in my tastes. I do not so much mind what people worship, if they are only sincere about it."
"It must be a great comfort to believe every thing, if one only could."
"There is often danger," he observed, "that we assume it to be a weakness to believe any thing."
"It is, I'm afraid," replied she, turning her face from him and seemingly intent upon her modeling.
"At least we believe in work," Herman answered, "else we are not artists. You certainly find joy and support in your art."
"Yes," Helen said with a sigh; "but I fancy the joy of creation, great as it is, can never be so satisfying to a woman as to a man. It is humiliating to confess—or it is presumptuous to boast, I am not sure which—but a woman is never so fully an artist as a man. He is in great moments all artist; but a woman is never able to lay herself aside even in her most imaginative moods."
"I cannot think you wholly right," her master returned smiling; "but to go back a little, at least faith is woman's peculiar province and prerogative. We seem nowadays to pride ourselves upon being superior to belief in any thing; but it is really a poor enough hypocrisy. If we really believed nothing, should we ever give up a single selfish desire or combat any impulse that seizes us. For my part, I am glad to find men better than their professions. But this," he added with his genial smile, "is more of a sermon, very likely, than you heard at church."
"I at least agree with it better than the one I heard at church this morning. The preacher patronized the Deity so that he shocked me."