“Oh, he can't; he's young and beautiful.”
“Don't you believe that beautiful people can be villains?”
“No,” said Stella; “it 's silly.” She looked for a while out to her familiar sea, the source of all her inspiration, and her brows were delicately knitted. “I may as well tell you,” she said at last with great solemnity, “a conclusion I've come to after lots of thought—yes, dear Belovedest, I lie here and think lots and lots—I don't believe the Bible is true.”
“My dear Stella!” he cried, scandalized. He himself did not believe in the Jonah and whale story or in many other things contained in Holy Writ, and did not go to church, and was sceptical as to existence of anthropomorphous angels; but he held the truly British conviction of the necessity of faith in the young and innocent. Stella having been bred in the unquestioning calm of Anglican orthodoxy, her atheistical pronouncement was staggering. “My dear Stella!” he cried. “The Bible not true?”
She flushed. “Oh, I believe it's all true as far as it goes,” she exclaimed quickly. “But it 's not true about people to-day. All those dreadful things that are told in it—the cruelty of Joseph's brethren, for instance—did happen; but they happened so long, long ago. People have had lots and lots of time to grow better. Have n't they?”
“They certainly have, my dear,” said John.
“And then Christ came to wash away everybody's sins.”
“He did,” said John.
“So it seems to me we can disregard a great deal of religion. It does n't affect us. We are n't good like the angels, I know,” she remarked with the seriousness of a young disputant in the school of Duns Scotus; “but men don't kill each other, or rob each other, or be cruel to the weak, and nobody tells horrible lies, do they?”
“I think we 've improved during the last few thousand years,” said John.