“I mean that I believe in the saints as little as you do.”
“But you believe in your Church?”
“I have no Church.”
There was a silence in which Don Ippolito again dropped his head upon his breast. Florida leaned forward in her eagerness, and murmured, “You believe in God?”
The priest lifted his eyes and looked at her beseechingly. “I do not know,” he whispered. She met his gaze with one of dumb bewilderment. At last she said: “Sometimes you baptize little children and receive them into the church in the name of God?”
“Yes.”
“Poor creatures come to you and confess their sins, and you absolve them, or order them to do penances?”
“Yes.”
“And sometimes when people are dying, you must stand by their death-beds and give them the last consolations of religion?”
“It is true.”