"Is that altogether true?" was my reply, for I was led to take up an attitude of the soundness of which I was far from being convinced. "Is not France literally sick and tired of the atheism which surged over the nation at the time of the Revolution? France no longer glories in hard unbelief, and, as far as I know, the French people are simply longing for faith, and, for that matter, are going back to faith. Not, perhaps, the faith which the Revolution destroyed, but to something deeper, diviner."
She seemed thoughtful, and for some time neither of us spoke. Then she burst out laughing merrily.
"Don't things seem reversed?" she said. "Here are you, a scholar of Oxford, and a clever lawyer, upholding tradition, imagination, intuition, superstition, while I, an ignorant girl, am discarding it all."
"Perhaps," I replied, "that is because life is long to you, short to me. When one comes to what seems the end of things, one looks at life differently. There," I went on, for at that moment we had passed a lad with his arm round a girl's waist, "that boy lives in heaven. He is with the girl he loves. Suppose you tried to convince that boy and girl there was no such thing as romance, would they believe you?"
"Perhaps not," she replied; "but I could take you down the village yonder, and show you men and women who, twenty years ago, were just as romantic as those two cooing doves; and to-day the men loaf round the village lanes, smoking, or, perhaps, are in the public-house drinking; while the women are slatternly, discontented, standing at the wash-tub, or scrubbing out cottages. Where now is the romance, or, for that matter, the love?"
"Then you don't believe in love either?"
She was silent, and I watched her face closely, and again I was struck by her appearance. Yes, no doubt, Isabella Lethbridge was more than ordinarily handsome. Her features, without being beautiful, were fine. The flash of her eyes betokened intelligence beyond the ordinary. At that moment, too, there was a look in them which I had not seen before—a kind of longing, a sense of unsatisfaction, something wistful.
"Love?" she repeated. "No, I don't think I believe in it."
"Surely," I said, "that is going a little bit too far."
"Yes, perhaps it is," was her answer. "There is love—the love of a mother for her child. You see it everywhere. A lion will fight for her whelps, a hen will protect her chickens. But I suppose you were meaning the love which man has for a woman, and woman for man?"