The Church seemed to them as an immense sleeping beast, in whose lap they had found peace and protection.
Gabriel spoke of his past, in order to convince the young woman that his work in the Cathedral would not be very arduous.

He had suffered much; there was no bitterness that he had not tasted; he had endured hunger, terrible hunger, in his peregrinations through the world.
He did not know which were the most painful, his martyrdom in the dungeons of the gloomy castle, or his days of despair in the streets of crowded cities, seeing food and gold through the glass windows of the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger.
He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and melancholy companion.
Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.
"Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her.

She was a strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of thought than by carnal attraction.

I loved her when I first saw her.
I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way, that I do not for certain know what it is." He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his beliefs.

Goethe had defined it as an "elective affinity," speaking as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct product.