"What can I say?" Gilardoni answered. "It seems to me a thought of great beauty! I cannot say: a great truth. Indeed I do not know. I have never thought about it, but it is very beautiful! I will say that Christianity has never had, has never even imagined a Saint so sublime as this _some one_! It is very beautiful, very beautiful!"
"And besides," Luisa continued after a short silence, "it might also be maintained that this future would not mean perfect happiness. Can there be happiness if we do not know the reasons of all things? If we may not explain all mysteries? And will this longing to know all things be satisfied in the future life? Will there not always remain one impenetrable mystery? Do they not teach us that we shall never understand God perfectly? Therefore, in our longing to know, shall we not end by suffering as at present, perhaps even more, because in a higher life that longing must become stronger? I can only see one way of arriving at a knowledge of everything, and that would be to become God----"
"Ah! You are a pantheist!" the Professor exclaimed, interrupting her.
"Hush!" said Luisa. "No, no, no, I am a Catholic Christian. I am only repeating what others might say."
"Pardon me, but there is a pantheism----"
"Philosophy still?" exclaimed Franco, coming in with the little one in his arms.
"Oh, misery!" grumbled Uncle Piero behind him.
Maria held a beautiful white rose in her hand. "Look at this rose, Luisa," said Franco. "Maria, give Mamma the flower. Look at the shape of this rose, its pose, its shading, the veins in its petals; look at that red stripe, and inhale its perfume. Now drop philosophy."
"You are an enemy of philosophy?" the Professor said, smiling.
"I am a friend of that simple and sure philosophy which even roses can teach me," Franco answered.
"Philosophy, my dear Professor," Uncle Piero put in solemnly, "is all contained in Aristotle. You can get all you want from that source."
"You are jesting," the Professor said, "but you yourself are a philosopher."
The engineer placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Listen, dear friend! My philosophy could all be put into eight or ten glasses."
"Mercy on us! Eight or ten glasses!" grumbled the housekeeper, who had caught her most temperate master's words of boastful intemperance, as she came in. "Eight or ten fiddlesticks!"