“I don’t know,” I replied thoughtfully. “To me it seems the essence of torture.”
He laughed.
“I think you are really beginning to learn,” he declared. “A short time ago you would have denounced us wholesale. But even the Devil is not quite so black as he is painted.”
“I think he is much blacker,” I retorted. “But I am beginning to doubt his existence.”
“It is the first time you have been down here?”
“Undoubtedly. What acquaintance I have had with any of your people has been upon the earth.”
“And there they appear slightly different from here,” he observed thoughtfully. “But then you know we are much maligned and caricatured.”
“Why don’t you put a stop to it?” I inquired.
He raised his eyebrows.
“The clergy do that for us,” he returned.