I do not know why I should have said all this, or centred it all about the Oratory, if it be not that Miss Linthorpe’s warning was right, and there comes a time when you grow old, and drop out of your generation, and the mind, satiated with the ceaseless pageant of the interminable, craves for some outward expression of the eternal. Anyhow, my conversion was neither a hysterical nor a sensational one. I kept very quiet about it beforehand—why, I do not know, unless it be from some vague, inherited instinct. It is true that at the time of which I type it is doubtful whether one-fifth of the population of England was Catholic, and that the act of being received into the Church was not quite the everyday thing it is to us. But already things were very different from my young days, when the Catholic Church was still regarded as something desperate and melodramatic, a conspiracy against the public peace. I remember, for example, when I was about ten years old how the news reached us that a family friend had made his submission, and Lady Trecastle, who was staying with us, talked about it in a hushed, shocked voice as if it were a thing one could hardly mention in front of children, although Lady Trecastle herself had no religious beliefs and never went near a church if she could help it. The day of all that was long over, yet somehow I felt shy and awkward about my religious intentions, and mentioned them to nobody—concealed them, I am afraid, rather deliberately, from Juliet Savage, whose keen criticism I confess that I dreaded.
Actually it was in coming away from the ceremony of my reception that I met her in the street. “Come and have luncheon somewhere,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you.” When we were comfortably ensconced at _Les Rossignols_, she turned to me and said, “Opal, my dear, I’ve just become a Catholic.” I said in a stupefied way, “So have I.” Then we giggled idiotically for a little; and cross-questioning proved that she also had written to Bishop Dives, and had been sent identically the same sermon-record! She then ordered a rather good Volnay, and when it appeared, leaning over coquettishly in its basket, she said, “Let us hope that this is drinkable, if not actually drinkworthy. Personally, I’ve got a droughtage on me which will demand a good deal of drinkage.”