Through the streets of Rome trotted in brown garb and great unloveliness a frequent monk, brave and true; and each of these, I was led by the feminine members of the family, to regard as a probable demon, eager for my intellectual blood. A fairer sight were the Penitents, in neat buff clothes of monastic outline, their faces covered with their hoods, whose points rose overhead like church steeples, two holes permitting the eyes to peep with beetle glistenings upon you. They went hurryingly along, called from their worldly affairs; and my mother imparted to me her belief that they were somewhat free of superstition because undoubtedly clean. Sometimes processions of them, chanting, came slowly through the city, bearing the dead to burial. I did not know, then, that the chanting was the voicing of good, honest, Bible-derived prayers; I thought it was child's play, useless and fascinating. In the churches the chanting monks and boys impressed me differently. Who does not feel, without a word to reveal the fact, the wondrous virtue of Catholic religious observance in the churches? The holiness of these regions sent through me waves of peace. I stepped softly past the old men and women who knelt upon the pavements, and gazed longingly upon their simpler spiritual plane; I drew back reluctantly from the only garden where the Cross is planted in visible, reverential substance. For the year ensuing this life in Rome, I entertained the family with dramatic imitations of religious chants, grumbling out at sundown the low, ominous echoings of the priests, answered by the treble, rapid and trustful, of the little choristers, gladly picturing to myself as I did so the winding processions in St. Peter's. In the square beneath our windows, during Lent, booths were set, and countless flat pancake-looking pieces of dough were caught up by a white-capped and aproned cook, with a long-handled spoon, and fried in olive oil placed in a caldron at the booth's door, to be served to passers in the twinkling of an eye. I watched this process until I grew to regard Lent as a tiresome custom. Having tested the cakes, I found them to be indistinct in taste, for all their pretty buff tint, and the dexterous twist of the cook's wrist as he dumped them and picked them up. If they had been appetizing I should have been sharply interested in the idea of becoming a Catholic, but their entire absence of relish convinced me that the Italians lacked mental grasp and salvation at a single swoop: and this in spite of the fact that one of my mother's most valued friends, Mrs. Ward, had lately joined the Church. It was her husband who said of her, "Whatever church has Anna, has St. Anna!" Perhaps the most exquisite speech ever uttered by a husband.