It was at once an immense relief to be told that he need not try any longer to write that stupid play, and a profound humiliation to be scolded by his wife. He did not know whether to be angry or ashamed. His eyes filled with tears, and he reached across the table and laid his hand in hers in silence.
“What was it you were going to tell me there in the Park,” he said after a while.
“I was thinking about ‘duty,’” she said. “Your attitude toward life reminds me of a little story I read the other day—I think it was in Anatole France ... a curious little story.... If you want to hear it?”
“Yes, tell me.”
XXXIII. A Parable
1
FELIX searched afterward through several volumes of Anatole France for that story, but he never could find it, and he suspected that she had made it up herself ... or perhaps it was a story her father had told her—it sounded rather like it....
2
“It seems,” she smilingly began, “that there was a young Roman nobleman, in the early Christian days, who was rich and handsome and beloved; and he had a slave who was a Christian. And Julian—I think that was the young nobleman’s name—used to discuss Christianity with this slave. It seemed to him a barbarian superstition, but he had heard of some intelligent people becoming converted to its doctrines, so he wanted to know more about it. The slave explained. And Julian laughed, saying that these doctrines were even more absurd than he had supposed.