"Yes."
"But I know no more than you do, my dear," said Nicholas. "I don't suppose we were ever meant to know."
Lily was intensely aware that such a conclusion shirked the question entirely, but she said nothing more.
It was from that time that she began to acknowledge to herself her own inner conflict between loyalty, that she had been taught was the supreme virtue, and the insistent demand of something within herself that claimed a right to independent judgment.
Reacting to the sense of having been deluded, Lily gradually forsook the habit of going to church, and was relieved when Nicholas made no comment.
They did not talk about religion. The subject was one which quite evidently held not the slightest interest for Nicholas.
Lily went once or twice by herself to the Brompton Oratory, but always with a sense of doing something wrong. She also purchased, almost furtively, from a green baize board erected at the bottom of the church, a penny pamphlet purporting to explain the chief difficulties that might be supposed to confront a potential "convert" to the Catholic religion.
The little book was ungrammatical, written in slipshod English, and was far from even being explicit. But Lily understood that in the Catholic Church was to be found even less liberty of thought than in her own. The Church told her children what to believe, and beyond that they might not look.
Lily wondered whether such restriction of outlook might not be conducive to great inward peace.
She thought of it wistfully and sentimentally, but knew very well that she could never now, of her own free-will, seek to suppress, unsatisfied, the new spirit of doubt that encompassed her.