“It’s very hard to decide which are my favorites,” he continued, surveying the long column through an opera-glass. “My religious disadvantages have been such that I don’t care much for priests or monks, or young John the Baptists, or small female cherubim, but I do like little charity-boys with voices of pins and needles and hair cut _à la_ dead-rabbit. I should like, if it were consistent with the consular dignity, to go down and rub their heads. I’m fond, also, of _old_ charity-boys, I find. Those paupers make one in love with destitute and dependent age, by their aspect of irresponsible enjoyment. See how briskly each of them topples along on the leg that he hasn’t got in the grave! How attractive likewise are the civilian devotees in those imperishable dress-coats of theirs! Observe their high collars of the era of the Holy Alliance: they and their fathers and their grandfathers before them have worn those dress-coats; in a hundred years from now their posterity will keep holiday in them. I should like to know the elixir by which the dress-coats of civil employees render themselves immortal. Those penitents in the cloaks and cowls are not bad, either, Miss Vervain. Come, they add a very pretty touch of mystery to this spectacle. They’re the sort of thing that painters are expected to paint in Venice--that people sigh over as so peculiarly Venetian. If you’ve a single sentiment about you, Miss Vervain, now is the time to produce it.” “But I haven’t. I’m afraid I have no sentiment at all,” answered the girl ruefully. “But this makes me dreadfully sad.” “Why that’s just what I was saying a while ago. Excuse me, Miss Vervain, but your sadness lacks novelty; it’s a sort of plagiarism.” “Don’t, please,” she pleaded yet more earnestly. “I was just thinking--I don’t know why such an awful thought should come to me--that it might all be a mistake after all; perhaps there might not be any other world, and every bit of this power and display of the church--_our_ church as well as the rest--might be only a cruel blunder, a dreadful mistake. Perhaps there isn’t even any God! Do you think there is?”