"All of which has taken me a long way from Queenie, who is neither ready for civilization nor for salvation. It's a most extraordinary thing, but I've suddenly got an idea that she has never been baptized. If she has not, I shall persuade her to be baptized. Baptism--the key to salvation! A passport--the key to civilization! The antithesis is not so ludicrous nor so extravagant as it sounds at first. Without a passport Queenie has no nationality and does not possess elementary civic rights. She is liable to be expelled from any country at any moment, and there is no certainty that any other country will receive her. In that case she will spend the rest of her life on earth in a kind of Limbo comparable to the Limbo which I believe is reserved for the souls of those unbaptized through no fault of their own. I shall be able to procure her a passport and introduce her to the glories of nationality by perjuring myself, but I can't give her a soul by perjuring myself, and I've got so strongly this intuition that she was never baptized that I shall dig out a priest and talk to him about it. And yet why am I bothering whether she was baptized or not? What have I to do with churches and their ceremonies? No doubt I was baptized, confirmed, and made my communion; yet for more than twenty years I have never entered a church except as an onlooker. Is this anxiety about Queenie's soul only another way of expressing an anxiety about my own soul? Yes, I believe it is. I believe that by a process of sheer intellectual exhaustion I am being driven into Christianity. Oh, I wish I could talk it all out! It's a damned dishonest way of satisfying my own conscience, to go to a priest and ask questions about Queenie. Why can't I go and ask him straight out about myself? But she is just as important as I am. I think that was brought home to me rather well, when the manager engaged me because he wanted her. There was I in a condition of odious pride because I had been given the chance of helping her by paying the beggarly fare to Bucharest, and, boomph! as dear Gainsborough used to say, there was she given the chance of paying me back a hundredfold within twenty-four hours." Queenie was out, and Sylvia was lying down with a headache which was not improved by the procession of these vagrant speculations round and round her brain. She got up presently to look for some aspirin, and, opening the drawer of the table between the two beds, she found a bundle of pictures--little colored lithographs of old masters. She was turning them over idly when Queenie came back. "_Ach_, you was looking at my pictures. They are so nice, yes? See, this is the one I love the best."