Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed Mary. “The official beatification,” he discriminated, “for she was beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when Bloody Elizabeth murdered her.”
And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the little Dauphin.
“Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth,” laughed the Duchessa, in an aside to Peter; “here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant Englishman.”
“Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'” said he. “Was n't it a word of Cardinal Newman's?”
“Yes, I think so,” said she. “And since every one is naming his candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman.”
“What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed marriages?” Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.
“It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,” his Eminence replied; “but in the abstract, and other things equal, my attitude would of course be one of disapproval.”
“And yet surely,” contended she, “if a pious Catholic girl marries a Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?”
“I don't know,” said the Cardinal. “Would n't it be safer to let the conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would have a hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of rendering her lukewarm.”
“Not if she had a spark of the true zeal,” said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. “Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man would be glad to submit, for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the good old days of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion of the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men in London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated only by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead them to the altar in the full meaning of the expression.”
“A dozen?” the Cardinal laughed. “Aren't you complicating the question of mixed marriages with that of plural marriage?”