"I know," she nodded, "mine is a garden."
"Is?" said Peter. "There's where you have the advantage of me."
"Oh!" she exclaimed, spreading her hands toward the pictured wall and the springing domes, "isn't this the evidence that it is always. Let us look."
The mass was over and the crowd departing; they moved from page to page to the storied wall and identified in it the springs of a common experience.
"It's like nothing so much," said Miss Dassonville, "as the things I've seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on the ground."
"Something like that," admitted Peter.
"And that's why," said Miss Dassonville, "it doesn't make me feel at all religious. Just—just—maternal."
It appeared by this time they had become well enough acquainted for Peter to remark that she didn't seem to feel under any obligation to experience the prescribed and traditional thrill.
"Well, I'm divided in my mind. I don't want to overlook any of the facts, and I want to give the poor imprisoned things a chance, if they have anything to say that the guide books have missed, to get it off their minds. I've always heard that celebrities grow tired of being forever taken at their public valuation. I've got a Baedeker and a Hare and The Stones of Venice but I neglect them quite as much as I read them, don't you?"
They had come down into the nave and she went about stroking the fair marbles delicately as though there sprang a conscious communication from the touch. He felt his mind accommodating to the ease of hers with a movement of release. They spent so much time in the church that when they issued on the Piazza at last it was with amazement to discern that the cloud mass which an hour before had piled ethereal tones of blueness above Frauli, lit cavernously by soundless flashes, had dissolved in rain.