Had Italy indeed been 'made too quick'?
Was all the vast struggle, and these martyred lives for nothing--all to end like a choked river in death and corruption?
Well, if so, whose fault was it, but the priests' ?--of that black, intriguing, traitorous Italy, headed by the Papacy, which except for one brief moment in the forties, had upheld every tyranny, and drenched every liberty in blood, had been the supporter of the Austrian and the Bourbon, and was now again tearing to pieces the Italy that so many brave men had died to make?
The priests!--the Church!--Why!--she wondered, as she read the story of Charles Albert, and Metternich and the Naples Bourbons, that Italy still dared to let the ignorant, persecuting brood live and thrive in her midst at all! Especially was it a marvel to her that any Jesuit might still walk Italian streets, that a nation could ever forgive or forget such crimes against her inmost life as had been the crimes of the Jesuits.

She would stand at the end of the terrace, her hands behind her clasping her book, her eyes fixed on the distant dome amid the stone-pines.

Her book opened with the experiences of a Neapolitan boy at school in Naples during the priest-ridden years of the twenties, when Austrian bayonets, after the rising of '21, had replaced Bourbons and Jesuits in power, and crushed the life out of the young striving liberty of '21, as a cruel boy may crush and strangle a fledgling bird.

'What did we learn,' cried the author of the memoir--'from that monkish education which dwarfed both our mind and body?
How many have I seen in later life groaning over their own ignorance, and pouring maledictions on the seminary or the college, where they had wasted so many years and had learnt nothing!' 'That monkish education which dwarfed both our mind and body'-- Lucy would repeat the words to herself--throwing them out as a challenge to that great dome hovering amid the sunny haze.

That old man there, among his Cardinals--she thought of him with a young horror and revolt; yet not without a certain tremor of the imagination.