ith a terrible denunciation delivered with the authority
which those alone can wield who believe themselves the mouthpieces of
Infallibility. She returns home profoundly shaken, with the dreadful
suspicion that her inmost secrets have somehow been discovered, and that
she has been preached at. A few days later she accidentally hears that
it is the princess de Belgiojoso who has been the object of the
fulmination: the relief is unspeakable, and produces a momentary
reaction, but the mark has been made.

It is impossible to follow in detail an operation which is like the
perpetual falling of drops of water or friction of grains of sand,
accompanied, moreover, by an occult, spiritual process like the function
of an organ. Before many months the proselyte put herself under the
direction of a Jesuit confessor. Little by little she had separated
herself from her few relations with the outer world; she went no more to
the French embassy or the French academy, where she had met fresh
currents of thought from political, artistic and literary circles; she
gave up a pleasant Italian house where there was superstition enough,
but not bigotry, broke off her intercourse with a lifelong friend, a
sincere but liberal member of the Gallican Church, and left the letters
of her only brother unanswered and unread. Her faculties were absorbed
by her fanaticism. "A secret metamorphosis was taking place within her:
her pride of intellect, her spirit of analysis, research, criticism, her
individuality of judgment, the energy of her own opinions, gave way
little by little under a revolution of her moral temperament, a sort of
inversion of her nature." She undergoes various phases of beatitude and
depression, and is amazed at the penetration with which her Jesuit
confessor, whose study has been human nature and whose learning is
soul-craft, divines her condition of mind. She lends herself to his
practices in the same way that assistant mortals unconsciously help the
spirits in table-turning. He finds her too self-tormenting and
scrupulous, and after a long and perfectly graduated exordium, in which
he has felt her spiritual pulse from time to time to ascertain that it
gave the due number of beats, and no more, concludes by telling her to
throw off all individual responsibility: he assumes that for her.
"Believe that when you appear before the tribunal of the Sovereign Judge
you can say, Lord, what I have done or omitted has been in obedience to