She was nothing if not Catholic, if not Ecclesiastical; but I don’t in the least mean that she was particularly devout. She observed all requisite forms, of course: went, as occasion demanded, to mass, to vespers, to confession; but religious fervour was the last thing she suggested, the last thing she affected. I never heard her talk of Faith or Salvation, of Sin or Grace, nor indeed of any matters spiritual. She was quite frankly a woman of the world, and it was the Church as a worldly institution, the Church corporal, the Papacy, Papal politics, that absorbed her interests. The loss of the Temporal Power was the wrong that filled the universe for her, its restoration the cause for which she lived. That it was a forlorn cause she would never for an instant even hypothetically admit. “Remember Avignon, remember the Seventy Years,” she used to say, with a nod that seemed to attribute apodictic value to the injunction. “Mark my words, she’ll live to be Pope yet,” a ribald young man murmured behind her chair. “Oh, you tell me she is a woman. I’ll assume it for the sake of the argument—I’d do anything for the sake of an argument. But remember Joan, remember Pope Joan!” And he mimicked his Aunt Elizabeth’s inflection and her conclusive nod. I had not been in Rome since that universe-filling wrong was perpetrated—not since I was a child of six or seven—when, a youth approaching twenty, I went there in the autumn of 1879; and I recollected Aunt Elizabeth only vaguely, as a lady with a face like a chapel, in whose presence—I had almost written in whose precincts—it had required some courage to breathe. But my mother’s last words, when I left her in Paris, had been, “Now mind you call on your Aunt Elizabeth at once. You mustn’t let a day pass. I am writing to her to tell her that you are coming. She will expect you to call at once.” So, on the morrow of my arrival, I made an exceedingly careful toilet (I remember to this day the pains I bestowed upon my tie, the revisions to which I submitted it!), and, with an anxious heart, presented myself at the huge brown Roman palace, a portion of which my formidable relative inhabited; a palace with grated windows, and a vaulted, crypt-like porte-cochère, and a tremendous Swiss concierge, in knee-breeches and a cocked hat: the Palazzo Zacchinelli.