“I dare say I shall seem greatly altered. But I am sure of one thing.”
“Of what?”
“That for the most part I shall be quite the same. I ask nothing better than to believe the fine things you say about my understanding, but even if they are true, it won’t matter. I shall be what I was made, what I am now—a young woman from the country! The fruit of a civilization not old and complex, but new and simple.”
“I am delighted to hear it: that ‘s an excellent foundation.”
“Perhaps, if you show me anything more, you will not always think so kindly of it. Therefore I warn you.”
“I am not frightened. I should like vastly to say something to you: Be what you are, be what you choose; but do, sometimes, as I tell you.”
If Rowland was not frightened, neither, perhaps, was Miss Garland; but she seemed at least slightly disturbed. She proposed that they should join their companions.
Mrs. Hudson spoke under her breath; she could not be accused of the want of reverence sometimes attributed to Protestants in the great Catholic temples. “Mary, dear,” she whispered, “suppose we had to kiss that dreadful brass toe. If I could only have kept our door-knocker, at Northampton, as bright as that! I think it’s so heathenish; but Roderick says he thinks it ‘s sublime.”
Roderick had evidently grown a trifle perverse. “It ‘s sublimer than anything that your religion asks you to do!” he exclaimed.
“Surely our religion sometimes gives us very difficult duties,” said Miss Garland.