of everything has the greatest
attraction for me."

"This is certainly not the spirit which will lead you to the Church!"

"But I thought I told you already, dearest, that it 's the road I
like, not the end of the journey. Courtship is confessedly better than
marriage, and the being converted is infinitely nicer than the state of
conviction."

"Oh, Gusta, what are you saying?"

"Saying what I most fervently feel to be true. Don't you know, better
even than myself, that it is the zeal to rescue me from the fold of the
heretics surrounds me every evening with monsignori and vescovi, and
attracts to the sofa where I happen to sit, purple stockings and red, a
class of adorers, I am free to own, there is nothing in the lay world
to compare with; and don't you know, too, that the work of conversion
accomplished, these seductive saints will be on the look-out for a new
sinner?"

"And is this the sincerity in which you profess your new faith? is
it thus that you mean to endow a new edifice to the honor of the Holy
Religion?"

"Cara mia! I want worship, homage, and adoration myself, and it is as
absolute a necessity of my being, as if I had been born up there, and
knew nothing of this base earth and its belongings. Be just, my dearest
sister, and see for once the difference between us. You have a charming
husband, who never plagues, never bores you, whom you see when it is
pleasant to see, and dismiss when you are weary of him. He never worries
you about money, he has no especial extravagance, and does not much
trouble himself about anything--I have none of these. I am married to
a man almost double my age, taken from another class, and imbued with
a whole set of notions different from my own. I can't live with _his_
people; my own won't have me. What then is left but the refuge of that
emotional existence which the Church offers?--a sort of pious flirtation
with a runaway match in the distance, only it is to be heaven, not
Gretna Green."

"So that all this while you have never been serious, Gusta?"

"Most serious! I have actually written to my husband,--you read the
letter,--acquainting him with my intended change of religion, and my
desire to mark the sincerity of my profession by that most signal of
all proofs,--a moneyed one. As I told the Cardinal last night, Heaven is
never so sure of us as when we draw on our banker to go there!"

"How you must shock his eminence when you speak in this way!"

"So he told me;