Assunta had risen from her prayers, and, as he took his place, was coming back to her mistress.  But Christina motioned her away.  “No, no; while you are about it, say a few dozen more!” she said.  “Pray for me,” she added in English.  “Pray, I say nothing silly.  She has been at it half an hour; I envy her capacity!”

“Have you never felt in any degree,” Rowland asked, “the fascination of Catholicism?”

“Yes, I have been through that, too!  There was a time when I wanted immensely to be a nun; it was not a laughing matter.  It was when I was about sixteen years old.  I read the Imitation and the Life of Saint Catherine.  I fully believed in the miracles of the saints, and I was dying to have one of my own.  The least little accident that could have been twisted into a miracle would have carried me straight into the bosom of the church.  I had the real religious passion.  It has passed away, and, as I sat here just now, I was wondering what had become of it!”

Rowland had already been sensible of something in this young lady’s tone which he would have called a want of veracity, and this epitome of her religious experience failed to strike him as an absolute statement of fact.  But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions.  She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour.  She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed in her talk were not so much perversions, as sympathetic exaggerations, of fact.  And Rowland felt that whatever she said of herself might have been, under the imagined circumstances; impulse was there, audacity, the restless, questioning temperament.  “I am afraid I am sadly prosaic,” he said, “for in these many months now that I have been in Rome, I have never ceased for a moment to look at Catholicism simply from the outside.  I don’t see an opening as big as your finger-nail where I could creep into it!”

“What do you believe?” asked Christina, looking at him.  “Are you religious?”

“I believe in God.”

Christina let her beautiful eyes wander a while, and then gave a little sigh.  “You are much to be envied!”

“You, I imagine, in that line have nothing to envy me.”

“Yes, I have.  Rest!”

“You are too young to say that.”

“I am not young; I have never been young!  My mother took care of that.  I was a little wrinkled old woman at ten.”

“I am afraid,” said Rowland, in a moment, “that you are fond of painting yourself in dark colors.”

She looked at him a while in silence.  “Do you wish,” she demanded at last, “to win my eternal gratitude?  Prove to me that I am better than I suppose.”