"Purified...." Henry recollected that Dr. Franchi was a modernist and a heretic. "A queer word," he mused. "I am not sure that I know what it means." "Ah. You are orthodox Catholic, no doubt. You admit no possible impurities in the faith." "I have never thought about it. I do not even know what an impurity is. One thing does not seem to me much more pure than another, and not much more odd. For my part, I accept the teaching of the Church wholesale. It seems simpler." "Until you come to think about it," said the ex-cardinal. "Then it ceases to be simple, and becomes difficult and elaborate to a high degree. Too difficult for a simple soul like myself. For my part, I have been expelled from the bosom of my mother the Church, and am now, having completed immense replies to the decree Lamentabili Sane and to the encyclical Pascendi Gregis, writing a History of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. Does the topic interest you?" "I am no theologian," said Henry. "And I have been told that if one inquires too closely into these mysteries, faith wilts. I should not like that. So I do not inquire. It is better so. I should not wish to be an atheist. I have known an atheist whom I have very greatly disliked." The thought of this person shadowed his brow faintly with a scowl, not unobserved by his host and hostess. "But," he added, "he became a worse thing; he is now an atheist turned Catholic...." "There I am with you," the ex-cardinal agreed. "About the Catholic convert there is often a quite peculiar lack of distinction.... But we will not talk about these." 16 They were now eating fruit. Melon, apricots, pears, walnuts, figs, and fat purple grapes. The night ever deepened into a greater loveliness. In the steep, sweet garden below the terrace nightingales sang. "On such a night as this," said Dr. Franchi, cracking a walnut, "it is difficult to be an atheist." "Why so?" asked Henry dreamily, biting a ripe black fig, and wishing that the ex-cardinal had not thought it necessary to give so lovely and familiar an opening phrase so tedious an end. "Don't tell me," he added quickly, repenting his thoughtless question. "What nightingales! What figs! And what apricocks!" (for so he always called this fruit). He hated to talk about atheists, and about how God had fashioned so beautiful a world. It might be so, but the world, on such a night, was enough in itself. Dr. Franchi's keen, gentle eyes, the eyes of a shrewd weigher of men, observed him and his distastes. "An æsthete," he judged. "God has given him intuition rather than reason. And not very much even of that. He might easily be misled, this youth." Aloud he said, "All I meant was that "'Holy joy about the earth is shed, And Holiness upon the deep,' as one of your Edwardian poets has sung. That was a gifted generation: may it rest in peace. For I think it mostly perished in that calamitous war we had.... But your Georgians--they too are a gifted generation, is it not so?"