Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?

----The God of of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

----Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger commit that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the penal days?

----I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.

----Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

----I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

They had walked on towards the township of Pembroke and now, as they went on slowly along the avenues, the trees and the scattered lights in the villas soothed their minds. The air of wealth and repose diffused about them seemed to comfort their neediness. Behind a hedge of laurel a light glimmered in the window of a kitchen and the voice of a servant was heard singing as she sharpened knives. She sang, in short broken bars, Rosie O'Grady.

Cranly stopped to listen, saying:

----Mulier cantat.

The soft beauty of the Latin words touched with an enchanting touch the dark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the touch of music or of a woman's hand. The strife of their minds was quelled. The figure of woman as she appears in the liturgy of the