“Good ones--certainly not!” said my companion. I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that, for myself, I was not sure it was bad for them, if the novels were “good” enough. “Bad for _them_, I don’t say so much!” Ambient exclaimed. “But very bad, I am afraid, for the novel!” That oblique, accidental allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by a franker style of reference as we walked home. “The difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or making any kind of common ménage, since the beginning of time. They have borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it’s the difference between Christian and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don’t like the name; it sounds sectarian. She thinks me, at any rate, no better than an ancient Greek. It’s the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you ‘ll get another better one in some other time and place. Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state, as well as in the present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty--I don’t know; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn’t think too much about it She’s always afraid of that, always on her guard. I don’t know what she has got on her back! And she’s so pretty, too, herself! Don’t you think she’s lovely? She was, at any rate, when I married her. At that time I was n’t aware of that difference I speak of--I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say. Well, perhaps it will, in the end. I don’t know what the end will be. Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that’s the way I try to show them in my novels. But you must n’t talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things as they are.” “She’s afraid of them for Dolcino,” I said: surprised a moment afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark should n’t have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it But he did n’t; he simply exclaimed, with a tenderness that touched me,--