Diana surveyed the typical young Englishman indulging a typically Protestant mood.
"I thought there were only a few old men left," she said, "and that it was all very sad and poetic?"
"That used to be so," said Ferrier, glancing round the church, so as to make sure that Chide was safely occupied in seeing as much of the Giotto frescos on the walls as the fading light allowed. "Then the Pope won a law-suit. The convent is now the property of the Holy See, the monastery has been revived, and the place seems to swarm with young monks. However, it is you ladies that ruin them. You make pretty speeches to them, and look so charmingly devout."
"There was a fellow at San Damiano this morning," interrupted Bobbie, indignantly; "awfully good-looking--and the most affected cad I ever beheld. I'd like to have been his fag-master at Eton! I saw him making eyes at some American girls as we came in; then he came posing and sidling up to us, and gave us a little lecture on 'Ateismo.' Ferrier said nothing--stood there as meek as a lamb, listening to him--looking straight at him. I nearly died of laughing behind them."
"Come here, Bobbie, you reprobate!" cried Chide from a distance. "Hold your tongue, and bring me the guide-book."
Bobbie strolled off, laughing.
"Is it all a sham, then," said Diana, looking round her with a smile and a sigh: "St. Francis--and the 'Fioretti'--and the 'Hymn to the Sun'? Has it all ended in lazy monks--and hypocrisy?"
"Dante asked himself the same question eighty years after St. Francis's death. Yet here is this divine church!"--Ferrier pointed to the frescoed walls, the marvellous roof--"here is immortal art!--and here, in your mind and in mine, after six hundred years, is a memory--an emotion--which, but for St. Francis, had never been; by which indeed we judge his degenerate sons. Is that not achievement enough--for one child of man?"
"Six hundred years hence what modern will be as much alive as St. Francis is now?" Diana wondered, as they strolled on.
He turned a quiet gaze upon her.