“Read it for its style, not for its matter,” said Hayward.

He talked enthusiastically of the music at the Oratory, and said charming things about the connection between incense and the devotional spirit.  Weeks listened to him with his frigid smile.

“You think it proves the truth of Roman Catholicism that John Henry Newman wrote good English and that Cardinal Manning has a picturesque appearance?”

Hayward hinted that he had gone through much trouble with his soul.  For a year he had swum in a sea of darkness.  He passed his fingers through his fair, waving hair and told them that he would not for five hundred pounds endure again those agonies of mind.  Fortunately he had reached calm waters at last.

“But what do you believe?” asked Philip, who was never satisfied with vague statements.

“I believe in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful.”

Hayward with his loose large limbs and the fine carriage of his head looked very handsome when he said this, and he said it with an air.

“Is that how you would describe your religion in a census paper?” asked Weeks, in mild tones.

“I hate the rigid definition:  it’s so ugly, so obvious.  If you like I will say that I believe in the church of the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Gladstone.”

“That’s the Church of England,” said Philip.

“Oh wise young man!” retorted Hayward, with a smile which made Philip blush, for he felt that in putting into plain words what the other had expressed in a paraphrase, he had been guilty of vulgarity.  “I belong to the Church of England.  But I love the gold and the silk which clothe the priest of Rome, and his celibacy, and the confessional, and purgatory:  and in the darkness of an Italian cathedral, incense-laden and mysterious, I believe with all my heart in the miracle of the Mass.  In Venice I have seen a fisherwoman come in, barefoot, throw down her basket of fish by her side, fall on her knees, and pray to the Madonna; and that I felt was the real faith, and I prayed and believed with her.  But I believe also in Aphrodite and Apollo and the Great God Pan.”

He had a charming voice, and he chose his words as he spoke; he uttered them almost rhythmically.  He would have gone on, but Weeks opened a second bottle of beer.

“Let me give you something to drink.”

Hayward turned to Philip with the slightly condescending gesture which so impressed the youth.

“Now are you satisfied?” he asked.

Philip, somewhat bewildered, confessed that he was.

“I’m disappointed that you didn’t add a little Buddhism,” said Weeks.  “And I confess I have a sort of sympathy for Mahomet; I regret that you should have left him out in the cold.”

Hayward laughed, for he was in a good humour with himself that evening, and the ring of his sentences still sounded pleasant in his ears.  He emptied his glass.