However, having unavoidably come into contact with most of her fellow visitors at the _pension_, she discovered that the maiden ladies of Rome were unlike their sisters elsewhere. They had peculiarly bright, gay, sometimes even radiant faces. Irene also noticed that between four and five o’clock in the afternoon some of them daily began to show signs of agitation. They blushed, made attempts at personal elegance, smartened up their modest black dresses by the addition of a lace collar or a bunch of fresh violets, solicitously saw to the arrangements of their little tea-tables, and constantly threw impatient glances at the door. The anxiously expected guests always turned out to be severe and majestic Catholic priests, before whom the ladies were tremulously shy. Irene assumed that the latter were probably newly converted Catholics, and her supposition was confirmed by a charming middle-aged English lady of an impoverished but famous old family, to whom Irene felt greatly drawn. Lady Muriel related that she had, the previous year, during a stay with relations in Ireland, made the acquaintance of a Catholic priest, “a most remarkable man,” and that now she was happy to say she had been converted to the Catholic faith. “I had thought,” she murmured, “that life was over for me, but now I see that it is only just beginning, and that happiness is before me. The Catholic faith is so warm, so tender, so consoling!” After this, Irene observed the Fathers and their spiritual daughters with redoubled interest. She was particularly attracted to an old French Dominican, called Père Etienne. His mother had been an Italian, and he had inherited from her the Roman type. “The face of a proud patrician,” thought Irene to herself. Like all Romans, Père Etienne was severe and forbidding, but when he laughed, which happened often, and always unexpectedly, his face became astonishingly kind and sympathetic, and almost childlike. Lady Muriel introduced him to Irene, and from her very first conversation with him Irene felt such a sympathy for Père Etienne, that, to her own astonishment, she poured out to him the whole story of her life, with all its doubts and fears and disappointments. The priest listened attentively, but evidently with disapproval, and when, in answer, he laughed a little at her faith—not the orthodox faith, of course, but her own personal ideas—Irene felt like a silly little girl who has received a scolding.