John knelt in the middle of the church, in the thick of the ragged, dirty, unsavoury villagers. When Mass was over, he returned to the cloisters, and there, face to face, he met the lady of his dreams.
"Good morning," she said, smiling, in a voice that seemed to him full of morning freshness.
"Good morning," he responded, wondering whether she could hear the tremor of his heart. "Though, in honest truth, it's rather a bad morning, isn't it?" he submitted, posing his head at an angle, dubious and reflective, that seemed to raise the question to a level of philosophic import.
"Oh, with these cloisters, one shouldn't complain," said she, glancing indicatively round. "One can still be out of doors, and yet not get the wetting one deserves. And the view is so fine, and these faded old frescoes are so droll."
"Yes," said he, his wits, for the instant, in a state of suspended animation. "The view is fine, the frescoes are droll."
She looked as if she were thinking about something.
"Don't you find it," she asked, after a moment, with the slightest bepuzzled drawing together of her eyebrows, "a trifle unpleasant, hearing Mass from where you do?"
"I should think it might be disagreeable to be hemmed in and elbowed by those extraordinarily ragged and dirty people," she explained. "It's a pity they shouldn't clean themselves up a little before coming to church."
"Ah, yes," he assented, "a little cleaning up wouldn't hurt them; that's very certain. But," he set forth, in extenuation, "it's not the custom of the country, and the fact that it isn't has its good significance, as well as its bad. It's one of the many signs of how genuinely democratic and popular the Church is in Italy,--as it ought to be everywhere. It is here essentially the Church of the people, the Church of the poor. It is the one place where the poorest man, in all his rags, and with the soil of his work upon him, feels perfectly at ease, perfectly at home, perfectly equal to the richest. It is the one place where a reeking market-woman, with her basket on her arm, will feel at liberty to take her place beside the great lady, in her furs and velvets, and even to ask her, with a nudge, to move up and make room. That is as it should be, isn't it?"