the face over a roll she was trying to break.
“They do bake their bread so hard here and in France,” the girl sighed, giving up the attempt in despair. “In Paris I could throw our rolls all about the room without injuring anything but the furniture. I didn’t make the smallest dent in the bread.”
The Signora promised them the most American of bread for the future, but added: “I have become so accustomed to this hard baking that I had forgotten all about the difference. In time you will come to prefer it, and to find that the lighter baking will taste raw to you. Indeed, you will adopt a good many Italian customs in regard to eating, which, so far as concerns health, I think they understand better than any other nation. Their prohibitions you must certainly attend to, however unreasonable they may seem to you; but you are not obliged to eat what they like. The first year I came here I broke a tooth trying to eat a piece of cake they brought me on Christmas Eve. They said it was their custom to eat it at that season, and I obeyed dutifully. It is dark, a caricature of our fruit-cake, and seems to be made of nuts and raisins, held together by a tough, dry paste. It was like a piece out of a badly-macadamized street. Fortunately, I broke only one tooth, and that saved my stomach; for I do not know what would have become of me if I had swallowed the stuff.”
Mr. Vane gave a significant “Ahem!” “I should have supposed,” he remarked, “that any one who had swallowed the Infalli—”
“Papa!” cried Isabel, making a peremptory gesture to silence him.
“—bility—” he pursued calmly.
“O papa!” said Bianca, with soft
entreaty. He winced, but finished—“ought to be able to digest anything that Rome can offer.”
The two girls looked at the Signora. They knew her rather better than their father did. She was folding her napkin up very carefully, and considering. After a minute, still smoothing the damask folds, she spoke. “I have always thought it wrong to ridicule even a false religion. When I think that on the poor crumbling mythologies of the world the souls of men have tried to climb to such a heaven as they had glimpses of, or were capable of imagining, their mistakes become to me sad, or terrible—anything but laughable. One doesn’t laugh at sight of a rotten plank that broke in the hands of a drowning man. And if falsehood, when human prayers have been breathed on it, and human tears shed on it, and human hearts have clung to it, believing it to be truth, is something no longer to be ridiculed, how much more should we treat the truth seriously! The dogma of Infallibility was the anchor the church dropped when she saw the storm coming, and it is probable that before we shall have peace again we may hang for a time on that one rope. Nothing in revelation is more serious to me.”
She rose, without giving any opportunity for reply, and without looking at any one. “If you like, we will prepare for a drive,” she added, and left the room quietly.