"I--I don't think I mean either," he replied, so naively that she was obliged to laugh; "but indeed," he went on, "it seems to me, as I remember the Bishop said in his sermon on All Souls, that beauty and goodness are in a measure synonymous, that----"
"Do you mean," she interrupted hastily, but with a sort of quick hesitation which came often to her speech when she was really interested, "that not only are good things necessarily beautiful in a way, but that beautiful things must be good? Look at Tito! All his vileness did not mar the perfection of his beauty. It was a tower of strength to him till the day of his death. It must be so--you can't help it. The thing is good in itself."
Never having read "Romola," the Reverend James fell back discreetly on a more unimpeachable proverb, by remarking, with the air of a man making a valuable contribution to the argument:--
"Beauty is but skin deep."
"Who wants it to be more?" she asked, hotly. "That is all you see. No one asks whether the muscles follow the proper curves beneath the skin, or the bones are strong. And, after all, it seems to me that goodness and beauty appeal to the same chord--the love of everything that is clear, defined, orderly. Ugliness is so incoherent, so indistinct, Mr. Gillespie! Did it ever strike you how unnecessarily ugly we all are? Now, don't deny the fact. Remember the Bishop's hymn says, 'only man is vile.'"
"But that really does apply to his moral."
"I don't agree with you. Some of us, perhaps, are wicked, but most of us are hideous."
"Do you really think so?" And the self-conscious look on his smug, comely face was too much for her gravity. She laughed merrily.
"There are exceptions to every rule, Mr. Gillespie; I only meant to say that since the strongest and best, and therefore, according to you, the most beautiful, had survived in the struggle for existence----"
"By the bye," he put in, for him quite eagerly, "the Bishop has just sent me an excellent reply to the Darwinian----"