"My dear fellow," she observed in her faintly satirical manner, "I know that I'm growing old, because whereas my convictions used to be all right and my actions all wrong, now my actions are right enough, but my convictions have all evaporated. Mr. Ashe is still young enough to need convictions, and the more rigid they are the more contented he'll be." "But with his training, to turn out in this way," responded Maurice. "It's amazing. Think of a New England Puritan turned Catholic!" "On the contrary, it is the most natural thing in the world. His Puritan training is what has made him a Catholic." Maurice thought a moment in silence. "I suppose," he said at length, "that in this age there are only two things possible for a thinking man. One must go over to Rome and rest on authority, or choose to use his reason, and be an agnostic." Mrs. Staggchase regarded him with a smile which made him flush a little. "'No doubt but ye are the people,'" she quoted, "'wisdom shall die with you.' Yet I have known persons really of intellectual respectability who haven't found it necessary to do either." He was too wise to answer her. He remembered that it was time to keep an appointment with Berenice, and he smiled with the air of one too happy to be ruffled. "I suppose," he remarked, as he rose to go, "that if I would give you the chance you would easily prove that Phil and I both are merely Puritans more or less disguised!"