"I am sure of it, Catharine. But recollect that my question related to what has long been customary among you."
"Among us! My dear, I am not a Turkish woman!"
"What then?"
"A Christian, just as you are. We were married by a Calvinist minister, the Rev. Martin Biro, now an exile in Constantinople, and for whom my husband, out of gratitude, has built a church where the Hungarians and Transylvanians who dwell there may attend divine service."
"Really! Then your husband does not persecute the Christians?"
"Certainly not. He believes that every religion is good, as leading to heaven, but that his own faith is the best, as opening the gate of the very highest heaven. Moreover, my husband has a very good heart, and is much more enlightened than most of his fellows."
"But why have you not tried to convert him to the Christian religion?"
"Why should I? Because our poets regularly conclude their love-romances in which a Turk falls in love with a Christian girl, by bringing him to baptism and dressing him in a mente instead of a kaftan? Here, however, you have one of those romances of real life, in which a woman follows her spouse and sacrifices everything for him."
"No doubt you are right, Catharine; but you must let me get used to the idea that a Christian, let alone an Hungarian, girl may wed a Turk."
"And listen, dear Lady Beldi: surely God would have imputed less merit to me, if I had converted my husband to our faith, instead of leaving him in the faith wherein he was born? As a Christian renegade he would have occupied but a humble place in our little church; while as one of the most influential of the Pashas, he has made the fate of all the Christians in Turkey so tolerable, that the Christian subjects of other states flock over to us as to a land of promise. Often, when he has received his share of the spoils of battle, he has handed me a long list with the names of those of my enslaved countrymen whom he has ransomed at a great price. He has expended immense treasures in this way. And believe me, love, the perusal of such a list gives me more pleasure than the sight of the most beautiful oriental pearls which my husband might easily have purchased with the amount, and it has raised him higher in my estimation than if he had learnt the whole Psalter by heart. And he is not the man to break the word he has once given, whether it be to God or to his fellow-man. If he were capable of abjuring his religion, I could believe no longer in his love, for then he would cease to be him whom I have always known; he would cease to be the man who, when once he has said a thing, always abides by it, never goes back from, and is to be moved neither by the terrors of death nor the tears of a woman."