'Not much,' he returned; 'what would you?'
'I think that you go a great deal farther in the other extreme!'
'Not at all,' he maintained. 'I am granting that art is a very fine thing; only there are so many more vital issues in life that one doesn't have time to bother with it much. However, I suppose it's a phase one has to go through with in Italy. Oh, I've been through with it, too,' he added. 'I used to feel that Botticelli and Giorgione and the rest of them were really important.'
Marcia laughed again. 'Mr. Sybert,' she said, 'I think you are an awfully queer man. You are so sort of unfeeling in some respects and feeling in others.'
'Miss Marcia, you strike me as an awfully queer young woman for exactly the same reasons.'
They had come to a curve in the road, and under an over-hanging precipice hollowed out of the rock was a little shrine to the Madonna, and beside it a rough iron cross.
'Some poor devil has met his fate here,' said Sybert, and he reined in his horse and leaned from his saddle to make out the blurred inscription traced on the bars. 'Felice Buconi in the year 1840 at this spot received death at the hand of an assassin. Pray for his soul,' he translated. 'Poor fellow! It's a tragedy in Italy to meet one's death at the hands of an assassin.'
'Why more in Italy than in any other place?'
'Because one dies without receiving the sacrament, and has some trouble about getting into heaven.'
'Oh!' she returned. 'I suppose when Gervasio's father wished that I might die of an apoplexy he was not only damning me for this world, but for the world to come.'
'Exactly. An apoplexy in Italy is a comprehensive curse.'
'I think,' she commented, 'that I prefer a religion which doesn't have a purgatory.'
'Purgatory,' he returned, 'has always struck me as quite superior to anything the Protestants offer. It really gives one something to die for.'
'I should think, for the matter of that, that heaven direct would give one something to die for.'
'What, for instance? Golden paving-stones, eternal sunshine, and singing angels!'
'Oh, not necessarily just those things. They're merely symbolical.'
'At least,' said Sybert, 'perfect peace and beauty and happiness, and nothing beyond. You needn't tell me, Miss Marcia, that you want to spend an eternity in any such place as that. It might do for a vacation--a villeggiatura--but for ever!'
