“Good ones—certainly not!” said my companion. I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn’t sure it was bad for them if the novels were “good” to the right intensity of goodness. “Bad for _them_, I don’t say so much!” my companion returned. “But very bad, I’m afraid, for the poor dear old novel itself.” That oblique accidental allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by a greater breadth 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 in making any kind of common household, since the beginning of time. They’ve 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 doubt if a poor devil _can_; 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 cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reserves. She’s always afraid of it, always on her guard. I don’t know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge it owes her or what resentment rides. And she’s so pretty, too, herself! Don’t you think she’s lovely? She was at any rate when we married. At that time I wasn’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 any professed picture. But you mustn’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 shouldn’t have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he didn’t; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: “Ah nothing shall ever hurt _him_!”