She considered before replying.

"Not only from a sense of duty, though of course I have felt that. I
don't _love_ anything of Michael Angelo's, but I am compelled to look
and study. I came here this morning only to refresh my memory of one of
those faces"--she pointed to the lower part of the Last Judgment--"and
yet the face is dreadful to me."

She found that he was smiling, and abruptly she added the question:

"Do you love that picture?"

"Why, no; but I often delight in it. I wouldn't have it always before
me (for that matter, no more would I have the things that I love). A
great work of art may be painful at all times, and sometimes
unendurable."

"I have learnt to understand that," she said, with something of
humility, which came upon Mallard as new and agreeable. "But--it is not
long since that scene represented a reality to me. I think I shall
never see it as you do."

Mallard wished to look at her, but did not.

"I have sometimes been repelled by a feeling of the same kind," he
answered. "Not that I myself ever thought of it as a reality, but I
have felt angry and miserable in remembering that a great part of the
world does. You see the pretty girl there, with her father. I noticed
her awed face as I passed, and heard a word or two of the man's, which
told me that from them there was no question of art. Poor child! I
should have liked to pat her hand, and tell her to be good and have no
fear."

"Did Michael Angelo believe it?" Miriam asked diffidently, when she had
glanced with anxious eyes at the pair of whom he spoke.

"I suppose so. And yet I am far from sure. What about Dante? Haven't
you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that did
really befall him? Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a
deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist's management of
his poem with the Christian's stem faith? In any case, he was more poet
than Christian when he wrote. Milton makes no such claims; he merely
prays for the enlightenment of his imagination."

Miriam turned from the great fresco, and again gazed at the Sibyls and
Prophets.

"Do the Stanze interest you?" was Mallard's next question.

"Very little, I am sorry to say. They soon weary me."

"And the Loggia?"

"I never paid much attention to it."

"That surprises me. Those little pictures are my favourites of all
Raphael's work. For those and the Psyche, I would give everything else."

Miriam looked at him in