"Why, no; but I often delight in it. I wouldn't have it always before me (for that matter, no more would I have the things that I love). A great work of art may be painful at all times, and sometimes unendurable." "I have learnt to understand that," she said, with something of humility, which came upon Mallard as new and agreeable. "But--it is not long since that scene represented a reality to me. I think I shall never see it as you do." Mallard wished to look at her, but did not. "I have sometimes been repelled by a feeling of the same kind," he answered. "Not that I myself ever thought of it as a reality, but I have felt angry and miserable in remembering that a great part of the world does. You see the pretty girl there, with her father. I noticed her awed face as I passed, and heard a word or two of the man's, which told me that from them there was no question of art. Poor child! I should have liked to pat her hand, and tell her to be good and have no fear." "Did Michael Angelo believe it?" Miriam asked diffidently, when she had glanced with anxious eyes at the pair of whom he spoke. "I suppose so. And yet I am far from sure. What about Dante? Haven't you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that did really befall him? Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist's management of his poem with the Christian's stem faith? In any case, he was more poet than Christian when he wrote. Milton makes no such claims; he merely prays for the enlightenment of his imagination." Miriam turned from the great fresco, and again gazed at the Sibyls and Prophets. "Do the Stanze interest you?" was Mallard's next question. "Very little, I am sorry to say. They soon weary me." "And the Loggia?" "I never paid much attention to it." "That surprises me. Those little pictures are my favourites of all Raphael's work. For those and the Psyche, I would give everything else." Miriam looked at him inquiringly. "Are you again thinking of the subjects?" he asked. "Yes. I can't help it. I have avoided them, because I knew how impossible it was for me to judge them only as art." "Then you have the same difficulty with nearly all Italian pictures?" She hesitated; but, without turning her eyes to him, said at length: "I can't easily explain to you the distinction there is for me between the Old Testament and the New. I was taught almost exclusively out of the Old--at least, it seems so to me. I have had to study the New for myself, and it helps rather than hinders my enjoyment of pictures taken from it. The religion of my childhood was one of bitterness and violence and arbitrary judgment and hatred." "Ah, but there is quite another side to the Old Testament--those parts of it, at all events, that are illustrated up in the Loggia. Will you come up there with me?" She rose without speaking. They left the chapel, and ascended the stairs.