“It may be,” said Isabel.  We were sitting in the Gardens of Adonis once occupied in part by the golden house of Nero, here where St. Sebastian was bound to a tree and pierced with arrows.  What material symbols for our thoughts!  Ruins of walls, columns and capitols lay about us; and on the air was borne the music of bells and the low murmur of Rome.  In this pause of our conversation I heard a cry and looking up saw Reverdy running toward us, throwing up his arms in delight and falling upon the breast of Isabel.  She embraced him with all tenderness; then arose and began to run with him about the garden.  In a little while we saw Uncle Tom approaching slowly.  He was much out of breath and looked definitely ill.  How had they found us?  Isabel had told Uncle Tom that we might stroll here; and Reverdy had prevailed upon Uncle Tom to drive this way.

In a few days there was to be a service at St. Peter’s which Isabel was eager to see.  She was talking to Uncle Tom about it, begging him to go, and he was half consenting though reluctant.  Reverdy was all delight over the prospect, and it was an opportunity for me to be with Isabel.  She had never become a communicant of any church.  But she abhorred atheism.  It denied the love that she saw in nature, the divinity that permeated the human mind; the law she sensed in growth and decay; the spirit of beauty that reigned everywhere to her imagination.  We were at one on this matter of denying a God, but the repugnance that I had had to imperial Catholicism had been increased by Serafino’s recitals of Italy’s sufferings under the Church and Austria.  And in Rome one saw the settled dominance of clericalism.  Perhaps the Church was like negro slavery.  If the Church ministered to beauty and spirituality, was it not asserted in favor of slavery that it afforded leisure; did it not correspond to the fertilization which enriches the roots of a gorgeous flower?  I could see Isabel turning to the esthetics in the Catholic service.  “What can you say,” she asked, “against a faith that surrounds itself with pictures, sculpture, music, incense, the rhythm of rich Latin, the appeal in words to life renewal, eternal life, purity, glory, tenderness?  Say what you will of it; condemn its external sovereignty, of guns and poison and machinations—­condemn these as you will—­its ritual calls to purer dreams.  And perhaps in all our life there must be oppression and particular injustice in order to produce the finest blossom.”

Uncle Tom seemed to be falling into more frequent indisposition.  He often lay in bed for the greater part of the morning.  There were days when he did not leave his room.  Again he would go forth to Canape’s; and while he was rarely in anything like a stagger, he was often saturated with wine, heavy and sleepy from its influence.  Isabel through it all treated him with unfailing kindness; and some of our excursions were interrupted because of Uncle Tom’s taking to bed after returning from Canape’s; or because he could not arise before noon after an evening with his friends.  She would not desert his side.  Was there something in my presence with his life with Isabel, our friendship for each other, that woke nerves to suffering which only drink could dull?