"You forget I'm a Catholic," said Julie, smiling rather doubtfully.
"Are you, Julie? I'd forgotten."
"The good nuns at Bruges took care of that."
"Do you ever go to mass?"
"Sometimes."
"Then you're not a good Catholic, Julie?"
"No," said Julie, after a pause, "not at all. But it sometimes catches hold of me."
The old clock in the hall struck. The Duchess sprang up.
"Oh, Julie, I have got to be at Clarisse's by four. I promised her I'd go and settle about my Drawing-room dress to-day. Let's see the rest of the house."
And they went rapidly through it. All of it was stamped with the same character, representing, as it were, the meeting-point between an inherited luxury and a personal asceticism. Beautiful chairs, or cabinets transported sixty years before from one of the old Crowborough houses in the country to this little abode, side by side with things the cheapest and the commonest--all that Cousin Mary Leicester could ever persuade herself to buy with her own money. For all the latter part of her life she had been half a mystic and half a great lady, secretly hating the luxury from which she had not the strength to free herself, dressing ceremoniously, as the Duchess had said, for a solitary dinner, and all the while going in sore remembrance of a Master who "had not where to lay his head."