"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures in Tyndall's translation, I might suggest that the Latin of the Ancient Romans should be pronounced in the Roman style! But Monsieur will pardon this tone of the pedagogue. I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical disquisition. Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with the request of an old man, and to wish you good-day."
He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly little bow, and as though undoubting that the other would pass on, plunged again into the picture. But Franky lingered to say, awkwardly:
"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."
"Hein? ..."
The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.
"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you desire to ask me?"
"Well, yes!" Franky admitted. "Don't quite pipe why, but I rather cotton to hearing your version.... Of the meaning of that picture, you know! ..."
"Yes—yes! I understand! ..." The vivid eyes flashed piercingly into Franky's, and leaped back to the great glorious canvas within the stately frame. "To you who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has no more tears to shed is Rachel of Rama.... To me, once Seminarist of the Institut Catholique, as to others of my holy faith and sacred calling—she is France—our beloved France, who leans upon the knees and against the bosom of the Catholic Church in her bereavement—mourning with anguish unutterable her children who are dead.... Dead to Faith, dead to the Spiritual Life—members separated from the Body of Christ by their own choice as by the act of Government. Lost!—unless the ray of Divine Grace find and touch them in their self-made darkness, and they repent, and turn themselves to Christ again!"
Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:
"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious point o' view. Still, when a whole nation gets up like one man and bally well chucks a Religion, there must be something jolly off-colour and thundering rotten about that Religion, don't you know?"