"That is enough for the present," he decided.
"My choice infant," she retorted, "your air of being my director is comic. And I could wish you were not so immaculate, so unworldly--you are tiresome more often than not. I could scream with laughing when I think you are supposed to be my servant of love." The striking of a silvery bell interrupted her with the necessity for a reverence. The mutter of prayer was instantly lost in echoless space. The genuflexions of the priests and acolytes were rapid. "This secrecy," she went on, "is against my disposition, unnatural. I am a woman in whom the complete expression of every feeling is not only a good but a necessity. There are times when I must, it seems, give way to my hatred of those perfumed captains. I sit beside Santacilla, with his hand on my knee, and, hidden by my skirt, my fingers are wedded to the knife in my stocking. A turn, a sweep of the arm ... there is a tearing cut I learned in the mountains."
The prayers, the Latin invocations, grew louder with the symbolized miracle of transubstantiation, the turning back of the bread and wine into the humility and forbearance of Christ.
Charles Abbott was still, pale and remote; and the heat of La Clavel's words died before the vision of an eternal empire of souls irrevocably judged. She sank forward again, the knotted fringe of her mantón spread out beyond the rug, upon the stone. After a little he told her that her courage, her daring and patience, were magnificent. But she replied that they were cold virtues. "All virtues are cold," Charles assured her seriously. If that were so, La Clavel whispered, her cheek close to his, she was lost to virtue. Anyhow, she didn't believe him, he could not, at his age, know so much. Yet not, God comprehended, that he wasn't both virtuous and cold; any other man in the world, not a heathen, would have flung himself at her. Charles said wearily:
"We have been over this before, and you know that I do not care for women. What I was a few years ago--"
"What I was a few years ago," he repeated with dignity, "is no longer true of me. I belong body and spirit to the cause of which you are aware. And if I didn't it would be, in many respects, no different--science and the liberation of a people are all one, selfless."