“Ourselves—you and I eating together. Nothing is the outcome of chance; God alone knows what divine purpose our strange meeting may be destined to work out. What wonderful changes, even in the highest destinies, have been wrought before now by the meeting—apparently fortuitous—of two persons! Reflect upon it, my dear Sir: sometimes a few minutes thought, or some incidental remark may suffice to throw a vivid light into the soul, and meanwhile.—No, no, thanks; no highly flavoured dishes; none of the delicacies of modern cooking.—Have you reflected...?”
“Will you have some wine?” asked Leon much disinclined to follow the priest on the antipathetic theme of his observations.
“No, I never drink it. A little water, if you please, and God bless the giver. Any fool, seeing us sitting opposite each other, would criticise you or me—: ‘Look at that wretched priest making up to a freethinker,’ they would say; or ‘Look at the infidel hob and nob with the parson;’ not understanding that though we are eating a little bread and meat together truth can never come to a compromise with error, nor error ever forgive truth, her bitterest foe,—Strawberries? I never taste them—since truth puts error to shame; hence she flies before truth, hiding herself blindly in her own conceits, or filling her ears with the tumult of the world.—But you are not eating!”
“I have no appetite.”
Paoletti had eaten but little; Leon hardly anything. Fixing his expressive eyes on Leon’s face, the Italian said with startling emphasis:
“Señor Don Leon, of all the world you seem to me the most to be pitied. Our poor Doña María is not to be pitied; no, only to be admired. If she dies she will enter the realm of the blest wearing many crowns, and among them the crown of martyrdom; if she lives she will be an example to all women. She is a fair lily, combining the graces of beauty, purity and fragrance.”
“Yes. She was, no doubt, such a lily,” said Leon, turning very white, while his whole being quivered with excitement.—“A lily which, in its purity and fragrance, invited Christian love and promised all the honest joys of life....”
“But it grew close by a thistle....”
“No,” interrupted Leon. “A hippopotamus came and broke it down with its ruthless tread.”