Later they came to speak of a novel which lay on the table, and which Nora had been reading. “It is very silly,” she said, “but I go on with it in spite of myself. I am afraid I am too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can’t read it. I recommend you this, by the way. The hero is a young clergyman, endowed with every charm, who falls in love with a Roman Catholic. She is rather a bigot, and though she loves the young man, she loves her religion better. To win his suit he comes near going over to Rome; but he pulls up short and determines the mountain shall come to Mahomet. He sets bravely to work, converts the young lady, baptizes her one week and marries her the next.” “Heaven preserve us, what a hotch-potch!” cried Hubert. “Is that what they are writing nowadays? I very seldom read a novel, but when I glance into one, I am sure to find some such stuff as that! Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination. Common life,—I don’t say it’s a vision of bliss, but it’s better than that. Their stories are like the underside of a carpet,—nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue,—a muddle of figures without shape and flowers without color. When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the dénouement. Your clergyman here with his Romish sweetheart must be a very poor creature. Why didn’t he marry her first and convert her afterwards? Isn’t a clergyman after all, before all, a man? I mean to write a novel about a priest who falls in love with a pretty Mahometan and swears by Allah to win her.” “O Hubert!” cried Nora, “would you like a clergyman to love a pretty Mahometan better than the truth?”