can
be no religion.... If there be no personal God who manages our affairs
and summons to everlasting bliss or torment, the matter is not worth
thinking about--at least not to a Catholic. Pious agnosticism is a
bauble unworthy to tempt anyone who has been brought up a Catholic. A
Catholic remains a Catholic, or else becomes a frank agnostic. Only
weak-minded Protestants run to that slender shelter--morality without
God. "But why are you like this?" he had said, fixing his eyes.... "I
think I see. Your father comes of a long line of Scotch Protestants; he
became a Catholic so that he might marry your mother. Your scruples must
be a Protestant heredity. I wonder if it is so? In no other way can I
account for the fact that although you no longer believe in a
resurrection, you cling fast to the doctrine which declares it wrong for
two people, both free, to live together, unless they register their
cohabitation in the parish books. Our reason is our own. Our feelings we
inherit. You are enslaved to your Scotch ancestors; you are a slave to
the superstitions of your grandmother and your grand-aunts; you obey
them."

"But do we not inherit our reason just as much as we inherit our
feelings?"

They had argued that point. She could not remember what his argument
was, but she remembered that she had held her ground, that he had
complimented her, not forgetting, however, to take the credit of the
improvement in her intellectual equipment to himself, which was indeed
no more than just. She would have been nothing without him. How he had
altered her! She had come to think and feel like him. She often caught
herself saying exactly what he would say in certain circumstances, and
having heard him say how odours affected him, she had tried to acquire a
like sensibility. Unconsciously she had assimilated a great deal. That
little trick of his, using his eyes a certain way, that knowing little
glance of his had become habitual to her. She had met men who were more
profound, never anyone whose mind was more alert, more amusing and
sufficient for every occasion. She sentimentalised a moment, and then
remembered further similarities. They now ate the same dishes, and no
longer had need to consult each other before ordering dinner. In their
first week in Paris she had learnt to look forward to chocolate in the
morning before she got up, and this taste was endeared to her, for it
reminded her of him. In the picture galleries she had always