It might have been a statement, it might have been a question.
Francesco nodded.
"Rome is as Ghibelline at this hour as if the Pope had lived forever at Viterbo!"
The Duke of Spoleto shrugged.
"A passing fever! Many a one's soul is in sympathy with one's snout!"
"You do not love the cowl," Francesco ventured, with a sidelong glance at his companion, whose nose was in the air as if he sniffed countless monasteries and convents.
After a time the Duke of Spoleto growled.
"If the world were so perilous a place, were it not more manly to go out and conquer it than to hide from it like a girl that bars the door of the room? What if Christ and the apostles had shut themselves up in stone cells, the grim silence, the half-starved sanctity of the cloister? What has it done for the world? Men make a patchwork quilt of life and call the patchwork religion and law!"
He threw the challenge into the balance of his discontent.