"If you had married me and been content to let me remain myself," Sylvia said, "you might have used that argument. But you showed you were frightened of what you'd done when you sent me to Hornton House."
"My dear child, I wanted you to go there for your own comfort, not for mine. After all, it was only like reading a book; it gave you a certain amount of academic theory that you could prove or disprove by experience."
"A devil of a lot of experience I get here," Sylvia exclaimed.
"You're still only seventeen," Philip answered. "The time will come."
"You're not threatening to run away from me already?" Philip asked, with a smile.
"I might do anything," she owned. "I might poison you."
Philip laughed heartily at this; just then Mr. Dorward passed over the village green, which gave him an opportunity to rail at his cassock.
"It's ridiculous for a man to go about dressed up like that. Of course, nobody attends his church. I can't think why my father gave him the living. He's a ritualist, and his manners are abominable."
"But he looks like a Roman Emperor," said Sylvia.
Philip spluttered with indignation. "Oh, he's Roman enough, my dear child; but an Emperor! Which Emperor?"
"I'm not sure which it is, but I think it's Nero."
"Yes, I see what you mean," Philip assented, after a pause. "You're amazingly observant. Yes, there is that kind of mixture of sensual strength and fineness about his face. But it's not surprising. The line between degeneracy and the 'twopence colored' type of religion is not very clearly drawn."
It was after this conversation that, in searching for a picture of Nero's head to compare with Mr. Dorward's, Sylvia came across the Satyricon of Petronius in a French translation. She read it through without skipping a word, applied it to the test of recognition, and decided that she found more satisfactorily than in any book she had yet read a distorting mirror of her life from the time she left France until she met Philip, a mirror, however, that never distorted so wildly as to preclude recognition. Having made this discovery, she announced it to him, who applauded her sense of humor and of literature, but begged her to keep it to herself; people might get a wrong idea of her; he knew what she meant and appreciated the reflection, but it was a book that, generally speaking, no woman would read, still less talk about, and least of all claim kinship with. It was of course an immortal work of art, humorous, witty, fantastic.