"So you really consider yourself a Jew still?"
"Mein Gott! have I ever been anything else but an enemy of the Philistines?"
She smiled: "Yes; but religiously?"
"Religiously! What was my whole fight to rouse Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep in his hole? Why did I edit a newspaper, and plague myself with our time and its interests? Goethe has created glorious Greek statues, but statues cannot have children. My words should find issue in deeds. Put me rather with poor Lessing. I am no true Hellenist. I may have snatched at pleasure, but self-sacrifice has always called to the depths of me. Like my ancestor, David, I have been not only a singer, I have slung my smooth little pebbles at the forehead of Goliath."
"Yes; but haven't you turned Catholic?"
"Catholic!" he roared like a roused lion, "they say that again! Has the myth of death-bed conversion already arisen about me? How they jump, the fools, at the idea of a man's coming round to their views when his brain grows weak!"
"No, not death-bed conversion. Quite an old history. I was assured you had married in a Catholic Church."
"To please Mathilde. Without that the poor creature wouldn't have thought herself married in a manner sufficiently pleasing to God. It is true we had been living together without any Church blessing at all, but que voulez-vous? Women are like that. But for a duel I had to fight, I should have been satisfied to go on as we were. I understand by a wife something nobler than a married woman chained to me by money-brokers and parsons, and I deemed my faux ménage far firmer than many a "true" one. But since I was to be married, I could not leave my beloved Nonotte a dubious widowhood. We even invited a number of Bohemian couples to the wedding-feast, and bade them follow our example in daring the last step of all. Ha! ha! there is nothing like a convert's zeal, you see. But convert to Catholicism, that's another pair of sleeves. If your right eye offends you, pluck it out; if your right arm offends you, cut it off. And if your reason offends you, become a Catholic. No, no, Lucy, I may have worshipped the Madonna in song, for how can a poet be insensible to the beauty of Catholic symbol and ritual? But a Jew I have always been."
"Despite your baptism?"
The sufferer groaned, but not from physical pain.