“You know I cannot understand your politics in Church or Empire; they are too difficult for me. My world is too young. It seems to me so much like the old disputes among the disciples which should be the greatest. We know Leo never wants to be greatest for himself. If he wants it for his city and his Church, I suppose it is because he thinks it best for all the rest. These tribes you call barbarian seem to change and migrate about so much, whilst your Rome seems to stay; and in their languages there seem so many different dialects, it is difficult to know whether they are languages at all, or only words put together from many languages, as a means of communication between travellers meeting for a few days by the way; whilst your Latin is always there, and always the same, and is the key to everything one wants to learn.” And Marius took comfort, and replied— “I suppose, as Lucia said, we have to live our lives _here_ and _now_, and must build the best we can for our here and now. And Christ, Who never leaves His flock, will decide, as the ages go on, what part of the building is only ours, and has to pass away, and what is His to endure for ever.” But with Salvian, the venerable presbyter at Marseilles, whom Marius had so reverenced of old, “Magister Episcoporum,” teacher of bishops, though never himself more than a presbyter, Ethne felt at home at once. His dark views of the Church and the world did not at all depress her. “It is as good as living in the house or tent of the old chieftain Job,” she said, “to be here. Of course we know the world is not right, nor, it seems, even the Church here on earth. And yet it is better than being with Job, because the venerable Salvian knows the Gospels, and is always sure of the victory of good.” “He sees how the battle is _lost_,” Marius said, “and that is a great part of the lesson how it is to be won. ‘Our own vices are killing us,’ Salvian says; and there is always hope if we can learn that the fault is our own.”