The conversation, I believe, took its direction chiefly from the initiative of Mrs. O’Donovan Florence.  With great sprightliness and humour, and with an astonishing light-hearted courage, she rallied the Cardinal upon the neglect in which her native island was allowed to languish by the powers at Rome.  “The most Catholic country in three hemispheres, to be sure,” she said; “every inch of its soil soaked with the blood of martyrs.  Yet you’ve not added an Irish saint to the Calendar for I see you’re blushing to think how many ages; and you’ve taken sides with the heretic Saxon against us in our struggle for Home Rule—­which I blame you for, though, being a landowner and a bit of an absentee, I ’m a traitorous Unionist myself.”

The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions of government and administration.  They should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further exercise and development of what someone had called “the starfire of the Celtic nature.”  Ireland should look upon England as her working-housekeeper.  And as for the addition of Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. “’T is an embarrassment of riches.  If we were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population.”

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.

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.”