“Why, Miss Vervain,” said Ferris gravely, “I’m very sorry if you’ve misunderstood my joking. I’ve never yet seen the procession to advantage, and I’d like very much to look on with you.” He could not tell whether she was grateful for his words, or annoyed. She resolutely said no more, but her mother took up the strain and discoursed long upon it, arranging all the particulars of their meeting and going together. Ferris was a little piqued, and began to wonder why Miss Vervain did not stay at home if she did not want to go. To be sure, she went everywhere with her mother but it was strange, with her habitual violent submissiveness, that she should have said anything in opposition to her mother’s wish or purpose. After dinner, Mrs. Vervain frankly withdrew for her nap, and Florida seemed to make a little haste to take some sewing in her hand, and sat down with the air of a woman willing to detain her visitor. Ferris was not such a stoic as not to be dimly flattered by this, but he was too much of a man to be fully aware how great an advance it might seem. “I suppose we shall see most of the priests of Venice, and what they are like, in the procession to-morrow,” she said. “Do you remember speaking to me about priests, the other day, Mr. Ferris?” “Yes, I remember it very well. I think I overdid it; and I couldn’t perceive afterwards that I had shown any motive but a desire to make trouble for Don Ippolito.” “I never thought that,” answered Florida, seriously. “What you said was true, wasn’t it?” “Yes, it was and it wasn’t, and I don’t know that it differed from anything else in the world, in that respect. It is true that there is a great distrust of the priests amongst the Italians. The young men hate them--or think they do--or say they do. Most educated men in middle life are materialists, and of course unfriendly to the priests. There are even women who are skeptical about religion. But I suspect that the largest number of all those who talk loudest against the priests are really subject to them. You must consider how very intimately they are bound up with every family in the most solemn relations of life.” “Do you think the priests are generally bad men?” asked the young girl shyly. “I don’t, indeed. I don’t see how things could hang together if it were so. There must be a great basis of sincerity and goodness in them, when all is said and done. It seems to me that at the worst they’re merely professional people--poor fellows who have gone into the church for a living. You know it isn’t often now that the sons of noble families take orders; the priests are mostly of humble origin; not that they’re necessarily the worse for that; the patricians used to be just as bad in another way.” “I wonder,” said Florida, with her head on one side, considering her seam, “why there is always something so dreadful to us in the idea of a priest.”