“Interesting mangle!” Coleman smiled his thanks. “But Bishop Odo, I fear, wouldn’t even have spared you; not even for your good works. Still less for your good looks, which would only have provoked him to dwell with the more insistency on the visceral secrets which they conceal.” “Really,” Rosie protested. She would have liked to get up and go away, but the Cossack’s blue eyes glittered at her with such a strange expression and he smiled so enigmatically, that she found herself still sitting where she was, listening with a disgusted pleasure to his quick talk, his screams of deliberate and appalling laughter. “Ah!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, “what sensualists these old fellows were! What a real voluptuous feeling they had for dirt and gloom and sordidness and boredom, and all the horrors of vice. They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it. _O esca vermium, O massa pulveris!_ What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes—what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?” And he threw back his head and laughed; the blood-dabbled tips of his blond beard shook. Rosie looked at them, fascinated with disgust. “There’s blood on your beard,” she felt compelled to say. “What of it? Why shouldn’t there be?” Coleman asked. Confused, Rosie felt herself blushing. “Only because it’s rather unpl—leasant. I don’t know why. But it is.” “What a reason for immediately falling into my arms!” said Coleman. “To be kissed by a beard is bad enough at any time. But by a bloody beard—imagine!” Rosie shuddered. “After all,” he said, “what interest or amusement is there in doing the ordinary things in the obvious way? Life _au naturel_.” He shook his head. “You must have garlic and saffron. Do you believe in God?” “Not m—much,” said Rosie, smiling. “I pity you. You must find existence dreadfully dull. As soon as you do, everything becomes a thousand times life-size. Phallic symbols five hundred feet high,” he lifted his hand. “A row of grinning teeth you could run the hundred yards on.” He grinned at her through his beard. “Wounds big enough to let a coach-and-six drive into their purulent recesses. Every slightest act eternally significant. It’s only when you believe in God, and especially in hell, that you can really begin enjoying life. For instance, when in a few moments you surrender yourself to the importunities of my bloody beard, how prodigiously much more you’d enjoy it if you could believe you were committing the sin against the Holy Ghost—if you kept thinking calmly and dispassionately all the time the affair was going on: All this is not only a horrible sin, it is also ugly, grotesque, a mere defæcation, a——” Rosie held up her hand. “You’re really horrible,” she said. Coleman smiled at her. Still, she did not go.