'I write very easily in French now, as easily as in English. M. Delacour looks over my proof, but he hardly finds anything to correct.' Mildred suppressed a smile, she had taken in the entire situation, and was determined to act up to it. It offered an excellent opportunity for acting, and Mildred was only happy when she could get outside herself. She crossed her hands and composed her most demure air; and, for the sake of the audience which it pleased her to imagine; and when Harold was not looking she allowed her malicious eyes to say what she was really thinking. And he, unconscious of the amusement he afforded, made delightful comedy. He tried to come to the point, but feared to speak too suddenly of the money she had drawn out of the mortgage, and, in his embarrassment, he took a book from the table. The character of the illustrations caused his face to flush, and an expression of shame to appear. Mildred snatched the book out of his hand, saying: 'That is one of M. Delacour's books.' 'You know the book, then?' 'One knows everything. You are not an artist, and see things in a different light.' 'I don't think that art has much to do with a book of that kind. You must have changed very much, Mildred.' 'No,' she said, 'that shows me how little you understand me. I have not changed at all.' The word suggested the idea, and he said, 'you have changed your religion. You've become a Roman Catholic. I must say, if that book is---' '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--'