meaning by the light of
the ignorance and stupidity that are in him! That doesn't sound very
practicable."

"Martini, what do you think?" asked the professor, turning to a
broad-shouldered man with a great brown beard, who was sitting beside
him.

"I think that I will reserve my opinion till I have more facts to go
upon. It's a question of trying experiments and seeing what comes of
them."

"And you, Sacconi?"

"I should like to hear what Signora Bolla has to say. Her suggestions
are always valuable."

Everyone turned to the only woman in the room, who had been sitting on
the sofa, resting her chin on one hand and listening in silence to the
discussion. She had deep, serious black eyes, but as she raised them now
there was an unmistakable gleam of amusement in them.

"I am afraid," she said; "that I disagree with everybody."

"You always do, and the worst of it is that you are always right,"
Riccardo put in.

"I think it is quite true that we must fight the Jesuits somehow; and if
we can't do it with one weapon we must with another. But mere defiance
is a feeble weapon and evasion a cumbersome one. As for petitioning,
that is a child's toy."

"I hope, signora," Grassini interposed, with a solemn face; "that you
are not suggesting such methods as--assassination?"

Martini tugged at his big moustache and Galli sniggered outright. Even
the grave young woman could not repress a smile.

"Believe me," she said, "that if I were ferocious enough to think of
such things I should not be childish enough to talk about them. But
the deadliest weapon I know is ridicule. If you can once succeed in
rendering the Jesuits ludicrous, in making people laugh at them and
their claims, you have conquered them without bloodshed."

"I believe you are right, as far as that goes," Fabrizi said; "but I
don't see how you are going to carry the thing through."

"Why should we not be able to carry it through?" asked Martini. "A
satirical thing has a better chance of getting over the censorship
difficulty than a serious one; and, if it must be cloaked, the average
reader is more likely to find out the double meaning of an apparently
silly joke than of a scientific or economic treatise."

"Then is your suggestion, signora, that we should issue satirical
pamphlets, or attempt to run a comic paper? That last, I am sure, the
censorship would never allow."

"I don't mean exactly either. I believe a series of small satirical
leaflets, i