‘God help you then!’
‘Some one, or something, has helped me a great deal too much, for three-and-thirty years of pampering. But, pardon me, that was a strange speech for a Christian.’
‘You must be a good Jew, sir, before you can be a good Christian.’
‘Possibly. I intend to be neither—nor a good Pagan either. My dear sir, let us drop the subject. It is beyond me. If I can be as good a brute animal as my dog there—it being first demonstrated that it is good to be good—I shall be very well content.’
The officer looked down on with a stately, loving sorrow. Raphael caught his eye, and felt that he was in the presence of no common man.
‘I must take care what I say here, I suspect, or I shall be entangled shortly in a regular Socratic dialogue.... And now, sir, may I return your question, and ask who and what are you? I really have no intention of giving you up to any Caesar, Antiochus, Tiglath-Pileser, or other flea-devouring flea.... They will fatten well enough without your blood. So I only ask as a student of the great nothing-in-general, which men call the universe.’
‘I was prefect of a legion this morning. What I am now, you know as well as I.’
‘Just what I do not. I am in deep wonder at seeing your hilarity, when, by all flea-analogies, you ought to be either be howling your fate like Achilles on the shores of Styx, or pretending to grin and bear it, as I was taught to do when I played at Stoicism. You are not of that sect certainly, for you confessed yourself a fool just now.’
‘And it would be long, would it not, before you made one of them do as much? Well, be it so. A fool I am; yet, if God helps us as far as Ostia, why should I not be cheerful?’
‘Why should you?’