They were now eating fruit. Melon, apricots, pears, walnuts, figs, and fat purple grapes. The night ever deepened into a greater loveliness. In the steep, sweet garden below the terrace nightingales sang.

“On such a night as this,” said Dr. Franchi, cracking a walnut, “it is difficult to be an atheist.”

“Why so?” asked Henry dreamily, biting a ripe black fig, and wishing that the ex-cardinal had not thought it necessary to give so lovely and familiar an opening phrase so tedious an end.

“Don't tell me,” he added quickly, repenting his thoughtless question. “What nightingales! What figs! And what apricocks!” (for so he always called this fruit). He hated to talk about atheists, and about how God had fashioned so beautiful a world. It might be so, but the world, on such a night, was enough in itself.

Dr. Franchi's keen, gentle eyes, the eyes of a shrewd weigher of men, observed him and his distastes.

“An Æsthete,” he judged. “God has given him intuition rather than reason. And not very much even of that. He might easily be misled, this youth.”

Aloud he said, “All I meant was that“‘Holy joy about the earth is shed,
And Holiness upon the deep,’

as one of your Edwardian poets has sung. That was a gifted generation: may it rest in peace. For I think it mostly perished in that calamitous war we had.... But your Georgians—they too are a gifted generation, is it not so?”

“You mean by Georgians those persons who are now flourishing under the sovereignty of King George the Fifth of England? Such as myself? I do not really know. How could it be that gifts go in generations? A generation, surely, is merely chronological. Gifts are sporadic. No, I find no generation, as such, gifted. Except, of course, with the gifts common to all humanity.... People speak of the Victorians, and endow them with special qualities, evil or good. They were all black recently; now they are being white-washed—or rather enamelled. I think they had no qualities, as a generation (or rather as several generations, which, of course, they were); men and women then were, in the main, the same as men and women to-day, I see nothing but individuals. The rest is all the fantasy of the foolish, who love to generalise, till they cannot see the trees for the wood. Generalisations make me dizzy. I see nothing but the separate trees. There is nothing else....”

Dreamily Henry wandered on, happy and fluent with wine and figs. A ripe black fig, gaping to show its scarlet maw—what could be more lovely, and more luscious to the palate?

As to Miss Longfellow, she was eating her dessert so rapidly and with such relish that she had no time for conversation. All she contributed to it was, between bites, a cheerful nod now and then at Henry to show that she agreed with him.

“Yours,” said Dr. Franchi, “is not, perhaps, the most natural view of life. It is more natural to see people in large groups, with definite characteristic markings, according to period, age, nationality, sex, or what not. Also, such a view has its truth, though, like all truths, it may be over-stressed.... But here comes our coffee. After we have drunk it, Gina will leave us perhaps and you and I will smoke our cigars and have a little talk on political questions, and matters outside a woman's interests. Our Italian women do not take the same interest in affairs which your English women do.”

“No,” Miss Longfellow readily agreed. “We don't like the New Woman over here. Perhaps Mr. Beechtree admires her though.”

“The New Woman?” Henry doubtfully queried. “Is there a new woman? I don't know the phrase, except from old Victorian Punch Pictures.... Thank you, yes; a little cherry brandy.”

“Ah, is the woman question, then, over in your country—died out? Fought to a finish, perhaps, with honours to the victorious sex?”

“The woman question, sir? What woman question? I know no more of woman questions than of man questions, I am afraid. There is an infinity of questions you may ask about all human beings. People ask them all the time. Personally, I don't; it is less trouble not to. There people are; you can take them or leave them, for what they're worth. Why ask questions about them? There is never a satisfactory answer.”

“A rather difficult youth to talk to,” the ex-cardinal reflected. “He fails to follow up, or, apparently, even to understand, any of the usual conversational gambits. Is he very ignorant, or merely perverse?”

As to Miss Longfellow, she gave Henry up as being not quite all there, and anyhow a bloodless kind of creature, who took very little notice of her. So she went indoors and played the piano.

“I am failing,” thought Henry. “She does not like me. I am not being intelligent. They will talk of things above my head, things I cannot understand.”

Apathy held him, drinking cherry brandy under the moon, and he could not care. Woman question? Man question? What was all this prating?

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