"Defend me from your mass of metaphor, your relics of barbarism. We, the wise ones, have our own hierarchy, our own Olympus."
"On my soul, you are welcome to it," quoth the man by the altar.
Balthasar's hand worked viciously; he was strenuous towards his own beliefs, after the fashion of dreamers delirious with egotism. The very splendour of his infidelity took its birth from the fact that it was largely of his own creating. His pert iconoclasm pandered to his own vast self-esteem.
"Tell me for what you live," said the man by the altar.
"For beauty."
"And the senses?"
"Colours, odours, sounds. To breathe, to burn, and to enjoy. To be a Greek and a god."
"And life?"
"Is a great fresco, a pageant of passions."
The Lord of Avalon sprang up and began to pace the aisle with the air of a man whose blood is fevered. For all his devoutness and his mystical fidelity, he was in too human and passionate a mood to be invulnerable to Balthasar's sensuous shafts of fire. The Lord Flavian had come by a transcendental star-soaring spirit, an inspiration that had torched the wild beacon of romance. He was red for a riot of chivalry, a passage of desire.