Here she was exhausted, and overcome too, poor Callista! with her own emotions.
“O that I could find Him!” she exclaimed, passionately. “On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch Him not. Why dost Thou fight against me?—why dost Thou scare and perplex me, O First and Only Fair? I have Thee not, and I need Thee.” She added, “I am no Christian, you see, or I should have found Him; or at least I should say I had found Him.”
“It is hopeless,” said Polemo to Aristo, in much disgust, and with some hauteur of manner: “she is too far gone. You should not have brought me to this place.”
Aristo groaned.
“Shall I,” she continued, “worship any but Him? Shall I say that He whom I see not, whom I seek, is our Jupiter, or Cæsar, or the goddess Rome? They are none of them images of this inward guide of mine. I sacrifice to Him alone.”
The two men looked at each other in amazement: one of them in anger.
“It’s like the demon of Socrates,” said Aristo, timidly.
“I will acknowledge Cæsar in every fitting way,” she repeated; “but I will not make him my God.”
Presently she added, “Polemo, will not that invisible Monitor have something to say to all of us,—to you,—at some future day?”
“Spare me! spare me, Callista!” cried Polemo, starting up with a violence unsuited to his station and profession. “Spare my ears, unhappy woman!—such words have never hitherto entered them. I did not come to be insulted. Poor, blind, hapless, perverse spirit—I separate myself from you for ever! Desert, if you will, the majestic, bright, beneficent traditions of your forefathers, and live in this frightful superstition! Farewell!”