Val looked at him with all her peculiar directness of gaze.
“Sometimes you talk as though you rather despised the Church,” she said bluntly.
There was a pause.
“If I have given you such an impression, I must apologize. It was most discourteous of me,” said Quentillian stiffly.
He was fully prepared to acknowledge and to defend his own purely rationalistic views, but the implication of a lack of taste in his behaviour as guest in an orthodox household offended him.
“I didn’t mean that,” said Val, calmly and gravely. “I know that a great many very clever people are not believers in the sense that my father is one, for instance; but they do respect the Christian ideal, all the same. I only wondered whether you were one of them. Do you mind my talking like this?”
The relentless voice of Quentillian’s inner monitor assured him that he was, on the contrary, ready to welcome any intimate discussion of himself and his views, on whatever subject.
Val looked at him expectantly.
“Where I differ from, for instance, your father, is in separating Christian morality from what might be called the miraculous element of Christianity. Frankly, I can’t accept the latter.”
“You don’t believe in the divinity of Christ?”