"Then I suppose that you think Phil is nearer to the heart of things than I am."
"Not in the least. The difference between you is superficial rather than real so long as you are both true to your convictions."
"But it seems to me," Maurice objected, "that Phil is looking at truth as a sort of fetish. He seems to feel that the root of the matter is in a dogma, and a dogma is only the fossil remains of a truth that is gone by."
"Have you caught the fever for making epigrams? I'm afraid there's a good deal of truth in what you say about Cousin Philip. He can't help looking at religion as an end rather than a means."
"Has it ever struck you that he might finish by going over to the Catholics?"
"No," she answered, "I confess I'd never thought of it; but I see what you mean."
"It will seem to him a moral catastrophe, a sort of ecclesiastical cataclysm," Maurice continued, "if Father Frontford isn't elected; and as far as I can judge there isn't much chance of that."
"No," she assented, "I don't think there is much chance."
"He said to me one day," added Maurice thoughtfully, "that in the Catholic Church there never could have been any danger of the election of a heretic bishop. I am afraid this will decide him."
Mrs. Herman regarded him with a smile, studying him as if she were reading the working of his mind.
"You think that a misfortune," she commented. "You feel that it is a step farther into the darkness."
"It is to narrow rather than to broaden his horizon, is it not?"
She played with her fan a moment, smiling to herself in a way which he did not understand, and looking down as if considering some old memory. Then she met his glance with a look at once kind and wistful.
"It isn't of much use to argue the matter, I suppose," were her words. "It seems to me as if in talking to you I see my old mental self in a mirror, if you'll pardon me for saying so. When we come out from any conviction, and most of all from a religious belief, it seems to us a profound misfortune that any man should still believe what we have decided is false. By and by I think you will see that the chief point is that a man shall believe. What he believes doesn't so much matter. It must be the thing that best suits his temperament."