‘Oh, really!’ said Alice, a little embarrassed; for she knew it must have been with the Lawlers that he had been staying.  At the end of a long silence she said: 

’I am afraid you have chosen a rather unfortunate time for visiting Ireland.  All these terrible outrages, murders, refusals to pay rent; I wonder you have not been frightened away.’

’As I do not possess a foot of land—­I believe I should say “not land enough to sod a lark”—­my claim to collect rent would rest on even a slighter basis than that of the landlords; and as, with the charming inconsistency of your race, you have taken to killing each other instead of slaughtering the hated Saxon, I really feel safer in Ireland than elsewhere.  I suppose,’ he said, ’you do a great deal of novel-reading in the country?’

‘Oh yes,’ she answered, with almost an accent of voluptuousness in her voice; ‘I spent the winter reading.’

‘Because there was no hunting?’ replied Harding, with a smile full of cynical weariness.

’No, I assure you, no; I do not think I should have gone out hunting even if it hadn’t been stopped,’ said Alice hastily; for it vexed her not a little to see that she was considered incapable of loving a book for its own sake.

‘And what do you read?’

The tone of indifference with which the question was put was not lost upon Alice, but she was too much interested in the conversation to pay heed to it.  She said: 

’I read nearly all Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning—­I think I like him better than all the poets!  Do you know the scene at St. Praxed’s?’

’Yes, of course; it is very fine.  But I don’t know that I ever cared much for Browning.  Not only the verse, but the whole mind of the man is uncouth—­yes, uncouth is the word I want.  He is the Carlyle of Poetry.  Have you ever read Carlyle?’

’Oh yes, I have read his French Revolution and his Life of Schiller, but that’s all.  I only came home from school last summer, and at school we never read anything.  I couldn’t get many new books down in Galway.  There were, of course, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot in the library, but that was all.  I once got a beautiful book from Dungory Castle.  I wonder if you ever read it?  It is called Madame Gervaisais.  From the descriptions of Rome it almost seems to me that I have been there.’

’I know the book, but I didn’t know a Catholic girl could admire it—­and you are a Catholic, I presume?’

‘I was brought up a Catholic.’

’It is one thing to be brought up a Catholic, and another to avoid doubting.’

‘There can surely be no harm in doubting?’

’Not the least; but toward which side are you?  Have you fallen into the soft feather-bed of agnosticism, or the thorny ditch of belief?’

‘Why do you say “the soft feather-bed of agnosticism"?’

’It must be a relief to be redeemed from belief in hell; and perhaps there is no other redemption.’