Dominic shook his tonsured head. “Yes, it is easy to mistake other strong feelings for hate. But you know what you feel here isn’t hate. The outside world has had barely three centuries to develop neuter seduction, while gender had millennia. Once thou bitest the peach thou canst not stomach bland gruel anymore. I knew thou wouldst come back. It’s amazing what members will do to keep coming back. Selling out a friend or fixing a vote is nothing, I mean real work: founding a business, starting a career in politics and fighting to the top as Casimir Perry has, because they know that at the top the fruit is sweeter. Madame doesn’t just make them addicts, she uses the addiction to make them vocateurs.”

“No. It’s strong, it isn’t that strong.”

“Read any Eighteenth-Century novel, or, better yet, nonfiction. Thou thinkest Marie-Antoinette commanded the nobility of France with her good diction?”

“I don’t think six hundred years of social progress can be undone that easily.”

Dominic’s eyes sparkled. “And since everyone agrees with thee, no one’s resisting. As with smallpox, you are more vulnerable now than in the filthy past, since without exposure you build no resistance, yet we do not vaccinate against a thing defeated. The more people insist that feminism has won, the more they blind themselves to its remaining foes.” He paused to slurp an eager breath, as if braced by the wind of his own words. “But we are not here to talk of gender, but of theology. Thou hast not had a session in three weeks, and thou’st had a number of theological shocks in that time.”

Carlyle crossed her arms. “You’re not my sensayer.”

“Dost thou really believe in thy Clockmaker? Is that genuinely belief thou feelest inside thee, or something weaker, a wish, wishing it were so, this easy answer, while in truth thou fearest something worse?”

“I refuse to do this.”

The stool creaked as Dominic leaned forward. “Does that not prove me right? If thy belief were strong, thou wouldst have nothing to fear in letting me nip at it. Thou wishest desperately for thy Clockmaker to exist, but desperation is not faith. How canst thou tell if thou believest?”

“Because I love God!” Carlyle declared, with all the strength and fervor with which she had risen from bed that morning, every morning, marking on her calendar how each day was sacred to so many names for God.

Dominic’s smile widened. “Thou lovest Him, dost thou?”

“I do. I love God and I love this universe They made: nature, humanity, all Creation. Sometimes I look out the window, or bite into an apple, and actually start crying at how wonderful it is that everything exists. God did all that. The world is our window onto God, and it is so infinitely beautiful that sometimes I think I’m just going to burst with how much I love it!”

The grim monk scratched the bare rim of his tonsure. “And thou thinkest thou canst not love something that thou dost not believe in?”