'Other people were in earnest; and you—'
'Were not? Charge home. I am prepared,' he said, smiling.
'You talk now—as though you were a Catholic—and you are not, you don't believe,' she said suddenly, in a deep, low voice.
He looked at her for a moment in a smiling silence. His lips were ready to launch a reckless sentence or two; but they refrained. Her attitude meanwhile betrayed an unconscious dread—like a child that fears a blow.
'You charming saint!'—he thought; surprised at his own feeling of pleasure. Pleasure in what?—in the fact that however she might judge his opinions, she was clearly interested in the holder of them?
'What does one's own point of view matter?' he said gently. 'I believe what I can,—and as long as I can—sometimes for a whole twenty-four hours! Then a big doubt comes along, and sends me floundering. But that has nothing to do with it. The case is quite simple. The world can't get on without morals; and Catholicism, Anglicanism too—the religions of authority in short—are the great guardians of morals. They are the binding forces—the forces making for solidarity and continuity. Your cocksure, peering Protestant is the dissolvent—the force making for ruin. What's his private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he'll make everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me—it is perfectly open to you to say'—he looked away from her, half-forgetting her, addressing with animation and pugnacity an imaginary opponent—'what do morals matter?—how do you know that the present moral judgments of the world represent any ultimate truth? Ah! well'—he shrugged his shoulders—'I can't follow you there. Black may be really white—and white black; but I'm not going to admit it. It would make me too much of a dupe. I take my stand on morals. And if you give me morals, you must give me the only force that can guarantee them,—Catholicism, more or less:—and dogma,—and ritual,—and superstition,—and all the foolish ineffable things that bind mankind together, and send them to "face the music" in this world and the next!'
She sat silent, with twitching lips, excited, yet passionately scornful and antagonistic. Thoughts of her home, of that Puritan piety amid which she had been brought up, flashed thick and fast through her mind. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands, to hide a fit of laughter that had overtaken her.
'All that amuses you?'—said Manisty, breathing a little faster.
'No—oh! no. But—I was thinking of my uncle—of the people in our village at home. What you said of Protestants seemed to me, all at once, so odd—so ridiculous!'
'Did it? Tell me then about the people in your valley at home.'