“It’s amazing, Florida,” he would say, “it’s perfectly amazing that you should have been willing to undertake the job of importing into America that poor fellow with his whole stock of helplessness, dreamery, and unpracticality. What were you about?”
“Why, I’ve often told you, Henry. I thought he oughtn’t to continue a priest.”
“Yes, yes; I know.” Then he would remain lost in thought, softly whistling to himself. On one of these occasions he asked, “Do you think he was really very much troubled by his false position?”
“I can’t tell, now. He seemed to be so.”
“That story he told you of his childhood and of how he became a priest; didn’t it strike you at the time like rather a made-up, melodramatic history?”
“No, no! How can you say such things, Henry? It was too simple not to be true.”
“Well, well. Perhaps so. But he baffles me. He always did, for that matter.”
Then came another pause, while Ferris lay back upon the gondola cushions, getting the level of the Lido just under his hat-brim.
“Do you think he was very much of a skeptic, after all, Florida?”
Mrs. Ferris turned her eyes reproachfully upon her husband. “Why, Henry, how strange you are! You said yourself, once, that you used to wonder if he were not a skeptic.”