But Gerald thought of his church, and of its handsome matters of faith in the way of organ music and of saints’ days and of broad-mindedness and of delightful lawn-sleeved bishops and of majestic rituals. He thought of newly washed choir-boys and of his prayer-book’s wonderful mouth-filling phrases, of rogation days and of ember days and of Trinity Sunday. He thought about pulpits and hassocks and stained glass and sextons, and about the Thirty-nine Articles, and about those unpredictable, superb mathematics which early in every spring collaborated with the new moon to afford him an Easter: and these things Gerald could not abandon. So he said: “No. No, Horvendile! I pay no homage to the wrinkled goddess.” Then Horvendile warned him again, “You may find that decision costly.” “That is as it may be!” said Gerald, with his chin well up. “For a good Episcopalian, sir, finds in the petulance of no heathen goddess anything to blench the cheek and make the heart go pitapat.” Still, he looked rather fondly through the dusk. And now his shoulders also went up, shruggingly. “Yet I concede,” said Gerald, “that, howsoever firm my churchmanship, and even with a princess waiting for me, I am tempted. For yonder flute-player who still delays to join her companions—who are now, no doubt, already about their merry games with one another and with their trained pets,—has charms. Yes, she has charms which give my thoughts, as it were, a locally religious turn, and make the notion of joining her a rather beautiful idea. I deplore, of course, her feathered legs. Even so, she displays, as you too may observe, in her so leisurely retreat, an opulence in that most engaging kind of beauty which once got for Aphrodite the epithet of Callipygê. I contemplate, with at least locally pious joy, the curving of those reins, the whiteness and the fineness of the skin, and the graciousness of those superb contours, designed without any stinting or exaggeration, into the perfection of those fair twin moons of delight—” But in a moment Gerald said, “Still, there is something vaguely familiar, a something which chills me—”