"What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.

Peter pricked up his ears.

"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."