protested, laughing. How? The girl could not be herself. A heretic go to
Confession? Carlino shrugged his shoulders, One Comedy of Errors more
or less, what did it matter? Protestantism and Roman Catholicisnt were,
after all, much the same thing. The priest would then regain his old
faith through contact with the simple, steadfast belief of the girl.
Here Carlino interrupted his story, avowing, in parenthesis, that he
really did not know what kind of belief Noemi held. She flushed,
and replied that she was a Protestant. Protestant, certainly; but a
Protestant pure and simple? Noemi lost her patience. "I am a Protestant,
that is enough," she exclaimed; "and you need not trouble yourself about
my faith."

Noemi was, in fact, true to her own faith, not so much from conviction
as from her reverent affection for the memory of her parents; and in her
heart she had disapproved of her sister's conversion.

Carlino continued. A mystic, sexual influence induced the old man to
seek for a union of souls with the girl. "What rubbish!" said Noemi,
with her familiar pout. Carlino went on unmoved. The most subtle, the
most exquisite part of his book was the analysis of this recondite
influence of sex operating alike on the old priest and the girl.

"Carlino," exclaimed Jeanne, "what are you thinking of? An old man of
eighty!" Carlino looked up as though he would exclaim to some superior,
invisible friend, "How dense they are!"

He had even thought of making his hero older still--say ninety; of
creating a sort of intermediary being between man and spirit, who should
have in his eyes the nebulous depths of the fast approaching things
of eternity. And the girl should have in her blood that mysterious