It was an extraordinary city, said antiquarians—­the one living example of the old days.  Here were to be seen the ancient inconveniences, the insanitary horrors, the incarnation of a world given over to dreaming.  The old Church pomp was back, too; the cardinals drove again in gilt coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light of lanterns.  A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take for granted that superstition and progress were irreconcilable enemies.

Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove from the volor station outside the People’s Gate, of the old peasant dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and horses—­strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment.  It had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest of the world proclaimed—­human, and therefore careless and individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.

The room in which he sat now by the window with shading blinds, for the sun was already hot, seemed to revert back even further than to a century-and-a-half.  The old damask and gilding that he had expected was gone, and its absence gave the impression of great severity.  There was a wide deal table running the length of the room, with upright wooden arm chairs set against it; the floor was red-tiled, with strips of matting for the feet, the white, distempered walls had only a couple of old pictures hung upon them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood on a little altar by the further door.  There was no more furniture than that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which stood a typewriter.  That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he wondered at it.

He finished the last drop of coffee in the thick-rimmed white cup, and sat back in his chair.

* * * * *

Already the burden was lighter, and he was astonished at the swiftness with which it had become so.  Life looked simpler here; the interior world was taken more for granted; it was not even a matter of debate.  There it was, imperious and objective, and through it glimmered to the eyes of the soul the old Figures that had become shrouded behind the rush of worldly circumstance.  The very shadow of God appeared to rest here; it was no longer impossible to realise that the saints watched and interceded, that Mary sat on her throne, that the white disc on the altar was Jesus Christ.  Percy was not yet at peace after all, he had been but an hour in Rome; and air, charged