Am I confusing the merely interminable with the eternal? No, it was at High Mass at the Oratory that I realized what eternity meant. The frivolous might find them simply interminable, those long Mozart masses that the Protestants go to hear. But if you are in the right spirit to catch the message of the place, then you find eternity. The three ministers, dwarfed by the height of the building, seem like ants crawling about in the presence of Something immeasurably greater than themselves: the Kyrie and the _Miserere nobis_ of the Gloria sound like what they are, tributes of abject servility to a King whose audience no unclean thing may approach; the spaciousness of the whole setting, music, and building, and ceremonies, stands for a poor sacrament of that Infinitude towards which all this self-annihilating homage is directed: you see the work of man’s hands as the little doll’s house it is. In one breathless moment of the Credo the heart seems to stop still, and all becomes an eternal moment, that silence which is kept before the throne of God. I do not know why I should have said all this, or centred it all about the Oratory, if it be not that Miss Linthorpe’s warning was right, and there comes a time when you grow old, and drop out of your generation, and the mind, satiated with the ceaseless pageant of the interminable, craves for some outward expression of the eternal. Anyhow, my conversion was neither a hysterical nor a sensational one. I kept very quiet about it beforehand—why, I do not know, unless it be from some vague, inherited instinct. It is true that at the time of which I type it is doubtful whether one-fifth of the population of England was Catholic, and that the act of being received into the Church was not quite the everyday thing it is to us. But already things were very different from my young days, when the Catholic Church was still regarded as something desperate and melodramatic, a conspiracy against the public peace. I remember, for example, when I was about ten years old how the news reached us that a family friend had made his submission, and Lady Trecastle, who was staying with us, talked about it in a hushed, shocked voice as if it were a thing one could hardly mention in front of children, although Lady Trecastle herself had no religious beliefs and never went near a church if she could help it. The day of all that was long over, yet somehow I felt shy and awkward about my religious intentions, and mentioned them to nobody—concealed them, I am afraid, rather deliberately, from Juliet Savage, whose keen criticism I confess that I dreaded.