"You then, sir I will say and no longer signore, are of the Romish faith?" And then at once: "Oh, it seems I must spend all this evening in apology, for both stupidity and boorishness. Of course you are of the faith, and Romish is a stupid word. For my part, I belong to nothing. I recognise," looking at Clark, "that it might still my soul in face of we know what if I belonged to something. But it is too late, I think. Severn, if I may speak so without disloyalty, does not in his work in his work bear the best witness for the Christian creed. It does not help his art, shall I say. Too gentle-Jesus feathery where the iron groin should show through."

"Art," said Clark, "is no, not everything."

"Religious," Gulielmi said, wine up for sipping. "To be religious is to respond to the numinous. It does not have to be your Mr Severn's gentle Jesus. I have read your poems. You treat Apollo, may I say, as a living numen."

John turned big eyes on him that flashed in the candles. "He is not mocked," he said. "That god is not mocked. That god can punish."

"Punish may be, but no save," Clark said.

"Save, yes, that too," John said fiercely. "I will say that only he can save. This you should know, as he is also the god of healing. It was to that side of him I was first led. I was," he told Gulielmi, "once a small sawbones."

"I had heard that."

"I knew that I was to serve one god, but I had mistaken which of his aspects it was to be. Save, yes, save. What does it profit a man to become a saint in heaven? What does it profit them he leaves behind?

"He can intercede," Gulielmi said, with mock primness, "at the Throne of the Most High."

"Saints do not create goodness, they but exemplify it. As for those called by Apollo, they make truth, they make beauty. They create, and in creating create also themselves. Let us not talk of the Christian God's part in the everlasting making and remaking of the world."