Hyla had never heard such talk before. Indeed, it is not too much to say that through all the years of his life he had never, until this day, been present at a conversation. Nearly all the words the serf had heard, almost all the words he himself had spoken, were about things which people could touch and see.
He and his friends, Cerdic notably, had touched on the unseen things of religion—"principalities and powers" who dominated the future—in their own uncouth way. But conversation about the abstract things of this earthly life he had rarely heard before.
For the first hour the novelty of it almost stunned him. He listened without thought, drinking it all in with an eagerness which defied consideration. It was his first and last social experience!
"Wilt not be so lonely in the cloister, friend," said Felix.
"Say you so?" answered the jester. "Yet to be alone is a powerful good thing. I have but hardly felt lack of humans this many a year. Many sorry poor ghosts of friends, gone to death back-along, come to me at night-time."
"And she, that saint that was thy wife, comes she to thee, Lisolè?"
"Betimes she comes, and ever with healing to my brain; but it is not the wife who slept by my side."
"More Saint and less Woman! Is that truth?"
Lisolè nodded sadly. The big monk stretched himself out at length so that the hot sun rays should fall on every part of him.
"I have no more to do with women," he said; "but in those other days I liked a woman to be a very woman, and not too good. Else, look you, wherein lieth the pleasure? It is because of the difference. Never cared I for a silent woman. If you would make a pair of good shoon, take the tongue of a woman for the sole thereof. It will not wear away. Full many a worthless girl has enslaved me—me whom no enemy ever did. Yet knowing all and seeing all, yet loved I all of them. And now—quantum mutatus ab illo!"