They were now eating fruit. Melon, apricots, pears, walnuts, figs, and fat purple grapes. The night ever deepened into a greater loveliness. In the steep, sweet garden below the terrace nightingales sang.
"On such a night as this," said Dr. Franchi, cracking a walnut, "it is difficult to be an atheist."
"Why so?" asked Henry dreamily, biting a ripe black fig, and wishing that the ex-cardinal had not thought it necessary to give so lovely and familiar an opening phrase so tedious an end.
"Don't tell me," he added quickly, repenting his thoughtless question. "What nightingales! What figs! And what apricocks!" (for so he always called this fruit). He hated to talk about atheists, and about how God had fashioned so beautiful a world. It might be so, but the world, on such a night, was enough in itself.
Dr. Franchi's keen, gentle eyes, the eyes of a shrewd weigher of men, observed him and his distastes.
"An æsthete," he judged. "God has given him intuition rather than reason. And not very much even of that. He might easily be misled, this youth."
"'Holy joy about the earth is shed, And Holiness upon the deep,'
as one of your Edwardian poets has sung. That was a gifted generation: may it rest in peace. For I think it mostly perished in that calamitous war we had.... But your Georgians--they too are a gifted generation, is it not so?"
"You mean by Georgians those persons who are now flourishing under the sovereignty of King George the Fifth of England? Such as myself? I do not really know. How could it be that gifts go in generations? A generation, surely, is merely chronological. Gifts are sporadic. No, I find no generation, as such, gifted. Except, of course, with the gifts common to all humanity.... People speak of the Victorians, and endow them with special qualities, evil or good. They were all black recently; now they are being white-washed--or rather enamelled. I think they had no qualities, as a generation (or rather as several generations, which, of course, they were); men and women then were, in the main, the same as men and women to-day, I see nothing but individuals. The rest is all the fantasy of the foolish, who love to generalise, till they cannot see the trees for the wood. Generalisations make me dizzy. I see nothing but the separate trees. There _is_ nothing else...."