She looked as if she were thinking about something.

"Don't you find it," she asked, after a moment, with the slightest
bepuzzled drawing together of her eyebrows, "a trifle unpleasant,
hearing Mass from where you do?"

John looked blank.

"Unpleasant? No. Why?" he asked.

"I should think it might be disagreeable to be hemmed in and elbowed by
those extraordinarily ragged and dirty people," she explained. "It's a
pity they shouldn't clean themselves up a little before coming to
church."

"Ah, yes," he assented, "a little cleaning up wouldn't hurt them; that's
very certain. But," he set forth, in extenuation, "it's not the custom
of the country, and the fact that it isn't has its good significance, as
well as its bad. It's one of the many signs of how genuinely democratic
and popular the Church is in Italy,--as it ought to be everywhere. It is
here essentially the Church of the people, the Church of the poor. It is
the one place where the poorest man, in all his rags, and with the soil
of his work upon him, feels perfectly at ease, perfectly at home,
perfectly equal to the richest. It is the one place where a reeking
market-woman, with her basket on her arm, will feel at liberty to take
her place beside the great lady, in her furs and velvets, and even to
ask her, with a nudge, to move up and make room. That is as it should
be, isn't it?"