'That book has nothing to do with me. I glanced at it once, that was all, and, when I saw what it was, I put it down.'
The subject was a painful one, and Harold was willing to let it drop.
'But why,' he said, 'did you go over to Rome? Wasn't the religion you were brought up in good enough for you?'
'I was so unhappy at the time. I had suffered a great deal, I didn't believe in anything—I did not know what was going to become of me.'
'Didn't believe in anything, Mildred—I'm very sorry…. But, if you found difficulty in accepting Protestantism, Catholicism, I should have thought, would be still more impossible. It makes so much a larger demand on faith.'
The discovery of the book had for a moment forced her out of the part she was playing, but religious discussion afforded her ample facility, which she eagerly availed herself of, to return to it.
'You do not understand women.'
'But what has understanding women to do with a religious question?'
Harold asked a little more petulantly than usual.
These were the words and intonation she had expected, and she smiled inwardly.
'Women's lives are so different from men, we need a more intimate consolation than Protestantism can give us. Our sense of the beauty—'