and presently made a close circle around the Signora’s chair.
“It gives the mind a stretch to hear different nations talking together, by even their feeblest representatives,” Mr. Vane had observed.
“Yes,” Marion replied, lingering, hat in hand. “It always gives me the same feeling of space and grandeur that I have at sea, when I watch the waves meet, as if the East and the West were rushing together to kiss or to tear each other.”
“I wonder,” said Bianca, “if all our national differences are to be obliterated in heaven, and if we shall have no more those little piquant characteristics and discussions which make us like each other even better here.”
The Signora sank into her armchair, quoting the famous recipe for cooking a hare: “‘First catch your hare.’ My dear friends, we are not yet in Paradise, and we have a good battle to fight before we shall get there, and I move that we look to our armor. At all events, heaven has been described for us by Him who makes it what it is.”
And then Mr. Vane came and stood at the high back of her chair, and a little beside her, and Isabel took a footstool at the other side. Marion and Bianca slipped into the sofa opposite.
“I have been thinking to-day,” she continued, “that, when we go to hear Mass in the Crypt of St. Peter, as it is not probable we shall ever meet there, all of us, again in this life, we ought all to think it a duty to receive Holy Communion, if we can. It seems to me that the special virtue we are to seek there is a stronger faith. I have been there before, but it was in the company of strangers. We are a company
of sympathizing friends. I think we should look forward to that visit as a call to make a profession of faith more resolute, if possible, than we have yet made.”
A silence followed her little speech, which had struck deeper, perhaps, than their expectations.
“Has no one anything to say?” she asked smilingly. “This is not a lecture, but a conversazione. Are we always to skim the surface in our talk?”