"No, I am not blaming you, Isabel," he continued. What I mean is this. You find it impossible to take all these things seriously. You think I enjoy dressing up in a monk's cowl and reciting a monk's Latin Office in a monk's stall, pretty much as other men enjoy putting on crowns and ermine and going to masques as princes and kings. You don't see that the mere cowl is very little more than nothing, and that a monk's faith and hope and love are nearly everything. You cried out in the chapel last night: 'So your Bride is only Religion, or only the Church, or only the Virgin.' Yes 'Only.' You said 'only.' And I am not quibbling on a mere word. You meant that a mortal bride--such a bride, for example, as Margarida--would be more real, more important, more entitled to my lifelong loyalty." He ceased. After pondering a little she raised her eyes and said: "In the main you are right. I'm afraid my vague notions of monks are not worth the trouble; but you have analyzed them correctly. In England we have some people who want to revive medieval tournaments with mailed men and horses, and lists, and queens of beauty, all complete. To me a modern monastery is practically the same thing, except that it's less interesting and more useless." "I do not know enough of your mind," he said slowly. "After all, monasticism is not the whole of the Church. The Church is wider and older than her religious orders. Do you object only to monasticism in particular? Or are you equally impatient of the Church in general?" "By the Church," she answered, "no doubt you mean Roman Catholicism. If so, I'm not a fair judge. I was educated with a bias against it, and I am gradually finding out that I was taught a great deal which was unfair and much that was untrue. But I will answer you as frankly as possible. Don't be hurt. I love the Church as I love a ruin in a landscape; but I should not love her if somebody should accomplish the impossible, and put her in a thorough state of repair." Springing up she stepped to the tumbledown shrine and laid her hands on the mossy shafts of its ivy-hung portal. "Be honest," she said. "Is not this little chapel far more beautiful in decay than ever it was when the roof didn't leak and these creepers were not allowed to twine about it? If I could wave a wand and bid every beauty-spot of moss vanish from the walls and make all the stones dead-white and all the angels sharp and true, would you love it as you do now? And it's the same, the very same, with the Church. When she was mistress of Europe, she was gaunt and hard and repellent. But she is marvelously picturesque in her decay. I don't know what our poets and painters and romancers would do without her."