P.S.--You must try to forgive me for this rambling and rather inconsequent letter, but I have been both inflicting and enduring, for the last ten days, a superfluity of full-dress lectures. So I have been writing to you, as a result, in my mental shirtsleeves. XVII _To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._ HOTEL MODERNE, LOURDES, _June_ 7, 1910. MY DEAR SALLY, I have just encountered one of those strange half-accidents that crop up like rocks in the quiet stream of one's everyday life just where a rock is the least likely to be. You turn the bend from Tuesday into Wednesday, and hey presto, before you know what's happened, your little canoe has been shot out of the main current into some unsuspected channel, whence it emerges presently as from a waking dream. Last week as I went into the club between an afternoon at the hospital and two evening visits in Kensington, I met Bettany, of whom you may perhaps have heard me speak. A quite successful Government official, he contrives also to edit one of the leading Roman Catholic newspapers and incidentally to organise with conspicuous ability periodical pilgrimages to various Continental shrines. He is a man who has always interested me, partly because he has seemed to me to possess in a very marked degree one of the strongest and most challenging characteristics of his Church--the habit, even in matters of religion, of completely dissociating the man from his function. A ladder for the faith of other people need not necessarily have any faith of its own--and be an extremely serviceable ladder for all that. In his particular case, a belief in the miraculous powers of those relics and waters to which he enables the faithful so comfortably to travel, is not, I think, _de fide_--demanded by his Church. In any case he does not possess it, but regards the whole phenomenon through his gold-rimmed spectacles with an entirely amiable, and of course very discreet, scepticism. At the same time his talent for organisation and his unique knowledge of Continental hotels and railways are entirely at the disposal of his more credulous brethren. And his name must be known in this connection to many thousands of Catholics on both sides of the Channel.