"I don't know quite where I stand myself," he had answered.
"You used to have a fine perception for things spiritual."
He smiled.
"I once thought I might find Rome at the end of my wandering."
"Ah!" she said, quite calmly, "my father used to say, 'You will all have to come back to Mother Church.'"
"I do not mean that I felt like that long," Ethan said, hurriedly, realizing that he was sailing under false colors, "or that I think now as I suppose you do. It's probably little more with me than that 'I was born in the wilds of Christianity, and the briers and thorns still hang about me.'"
"You got that from your Uncle John," she said, coldly.
"No; it was said the century before he was born."
"To me, God is the great fact of life. To be without God is to be without hope in the world."
Ethan shaded his lowered eyes with one hand as he answered: