To this conviction of hers is due Julie's easy and yet dignified moral attitude. She says: "I was educated by a philosopher, and in my husband's house I have lived in the society of free-thinking men, who have severed themselves entirely from the dogmas and observances of a church which they have helped to undermine; hence I have no superstitions and none of the weak-minded scruples which impel most women to bow their heads under a second yoke, superadded to that which our consciences impose upon us." It is Raphael who plays the girl's part when, time after time, he supplicates a woman of a spirit like this to return to the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. "I besought her to seek in a religion of love and tenderness, in the sacred gloom of our churches, in the mysterious faith in that Christ who is the God of tears, in genuflections and prayer, the relief and the comfort which I myself had found in them in my youth." Raphael's attempt at conversion was not entirely successful; he himself was satisfied with the result, but a more strictly orthodox Christian would hardly have been so. It is love, we are led to understand, which teaches Julie to believe in God. "There is a God," she said; "there is an infinite love, of which ours is only one drop, a drop which falls back into the divine ocean from which we have drawn it. This ocean is God. At this moment I feel, I see, I understand Him by means of my happiness.... Yes," she continued, with even more ardour in her glance and voice, "let the perishable names by which we have called the attraction which draws us to one another be forgotten. There is only one name which expresses it--that is God. He has revealed Himself to me in your eyes. God, God, God!" she called, as if teaching herself a new language; "God is you; God is what I am to you. We are God." All this impresses us as having more purpose in it than truth to nature. Not such is the eloquence of happy love. Had Julie's husband, the old philosopher, happened to overhear these effusions, he could have told the lovers that such doctrines and such emotions, far from being Christian, are pure pantheism. We cannot doubt that he would have done so with perfect calmness, for he does not feel the slightest jealousy. He knows that Julie and Raphael write to each other every day, and he also knows the ethereal nature of their love. When Raphael comes to Paris, all he says to him is: "Remember that you have not one friend but two in this house. Julie could not make a better choice of a brother, nor I of a son." It is comical that Raphael, for his part, should feel no disquietude concerning the old man, unless we reckon as such a feeling of regret that he is drawing near to the grave without any belief in immortality; and it is characteristic of the period that even the aged scientist is in the end converted.