It was the "Primavera," and Sylvia was astonished for a moment that Queenie's childlike and undeveloped taste should care for something so remote from the crudities that usually appealed to such a mind. Then she remembered that Botticelli as a painter must have appealed to contemporaries who by modern standards were equally childlike and undeveloped; and also that Queenie, whose nationality by the standards of civilization did not exist, had an Italian father, the inheritor perhaps of Botticelli's blood. Queenie sat on the bed and looked at her pictures with the rapt expression of a child poring over her simple treasures. From time to time she would hold one up for Sylvia's admiration. "See how sweet," she would say, kissing the grave little Madonna or diminished landscape that was drawing her out of Bucharest into another world. "I've got a book somewhere about pictures," Sylvia said. "You must read it." Queenie hid her face in her arms; when she looked up again she was crimson as a carnation. "I can't read," she whispered. "Not read?" Sylvia echoed. "I can't read or write," she went on. "_Ach!_ Now you hate me, yes? Because I was being so stupid." "But when you went to the school in Dantzig, didn't they teach you anything?" "They taught me ballet dancing and acrobatic dancing and step dancing. Now I must go to have my hair washed, yes?" Queenie got off the bed and hurried away, leaving Sylvia in a state of bewilderment before the magnitude of the responsibility that she represented. "It's like giving birth to a grown-up baby," she said to herself; on a sudden irresistible impulse, she knelt down upon the floor and began to pray, with that most intense prayer of which a human being is capable, that prayer which transcends all words, all space, all time, all thought, that prayer which substitutes itself for the poor creature who makes it. The moment of prayer passed, and Sylvia, rising from her knees, dressed herself and went in search of a priest.