She sighed. "How you do need rousing!"
He put his arm around her as they walked up and down the piazza. "My opinion is, little mother," he said, "that opinions are a bore. Who wants to be always listening to what other people think on subjects? Not one thought in a milliard is worth putting into words. I am sick of words, of gabble, of inanities."
"Yes, my son," she said gently. "But one expects a man to give his opinion once for all on religious questions."
"It is not a religious question, mother: it is a question of religions," the young man replied with a sort of impatience. "There is no greater bore than that same question. Why does not each person believe what suits him, and hold his tongue about it, and let every other do the same?"
"But truth! but truth!" said the mother.
Carl shrugged his shoulders. "Everybody thinks he has it shut up in his cranium."
"What! you renounce religion?" she exclaimed.
"Not at all," he said. "They are so many spiritual gymnasiums where people exercise their souls. They are very pretty and amiable for women, and for men who need them; but there are those who do not need them."
"Carl, you break my heart!" his mother cried out, gazing through tears into her son's face. The boyish look had gone out of it. There were weariness and sadness in it, and hardness, too.
Carl was in a bitter mood that day, but he tried to soothe the pain he had given. "I'll do anything," he said laughingly. "I'll turn Catholic. I'll go to hear John Conway. I'll read the Dairyman's Daughter. I'll teach a Sunday-school class."