That was the worst of it.  She was neither one thing nor the other.  She desired two lives diametrically opposed to each other, consequently she would never be happy.  But she was happy.  She had everything; she could think of nothing that she wanted that she had not got:  it was really too ridiculous for her to pretend to herself that she was not happy.  So long as she had believed in religion she had not been happy, but now she believed no longer—­she was happy.  It was strange, however, that a church always brought the old feeling back again, and her thoughts paused, and in a silent awe of soul she asked herself if, at the bottom of her soul, she still disbelieved in God.  But it was so silly to believe the story of the Virgin—­think of it....  As Owen said, in no mythology was there anything more ridiculous.  Nevertheless, she did not convince herself that the dim, vague, unquiet sensation which rankled in her was not a still unextirpated germ of the original faith.  She tried to think it was not a religious feeling but the result of the terrible interview still hanging over her, the dread that her father might not forgive her.  She tried to look into her mind to discover the impulse which had compelled her to turn from her intention and come to this church.  She remembered the uncontrollable desire to say a prayer:  that she could have resisted, but the moment after she had remembered that perhaps it was too late to find her father at home.  But had she really hoped to find him at St. Joseph’s, or had she used the pretext to deceive herself?  She could not tell.  But if religion was not true, if she did not believe, how was it that she had always thought it wrong to live with a man to whom she was not married?  There was no use pretending, she never had quite got a haunting scruple on that point out of her mind.

There could be but two reasons, he had insisted, for the maintenance of the matrimonial idea—­the preservation of the race, and the belief that cohabitation without matrimony is an offence against God.  But the race is antecedent to matrimony, and if there be no resurrection, there can be no religion....  If there be no personal God who manages our affairs and summons to everlasting bliss or torment, the matter is not worth thinking about—­at least not to a Catholic.  Pious agnosticism is a bauble unworthy to tempt anyone who has been brought up a Catholic.  A Catholic remains a Catholic, or else becomes a frank agnostic.  Only weak-minded Protestants run to that slender shelter—­morality without God.  “But why are you like this?” he had said, fixing his eyes....  “I think I see.  Your father comes of a long line of Scotch Protestants; he became a Catholic so that he might marry your mother.  Your scruples must be a Protestant heredity.  I wonder if it is so?  In no other way can I account for the fact that although you no longer believe in a resurrection, you cling fast to the doctrine which declares it wrong for two people, both free, to live together, unless they register their cohabitation in the parish books.  Our reason is our own.  Our feelings we inherit.  You are enslaved to your Scotch ancestors; you are a slave to the superstitions of your grandmother and your grand-aunts; you obey them.”