Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/202

182 If I stopped to give the world a name, it was bound to be Philadelphia, the place in which I was destined to live upon leaving the Convent. I knew that it was Protestant, as we often prayed for the conversion of its people, I the harder because they included my relations who if not converted could, my catechism taught me, be saved only so as by the invincible ignorance with which I hardly felt it polite to credit them. To what other conclusion could I come, arguing logically, than that Philadelphia was the horrible gulf of evil yawning for me, and that in this gulf Protestants swarmed, scattering temptation along the path of the Catholic who walked alone among them?—an idea of Philadelphia that probably would have surprised nobody more than the nuns who were training me for my life of struggle in it.

The gulf of the world did not seem so evil once it swallowed me up, but that socially the Catholic walked in it alone, there could be no mistake. When eventually I left school and began going out on my modest scale, I could not fail to see that the people I met in church were not, as a rule, the people I met at the Dancing Class, or at parties, or at receptions, or on that abominable round of morning calls, and this was the more surprising because Philadelphians of the "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine" set were accustomed to meeting each other wherever they went. Except for the small group of those Philadelphia families of French descent with French names who were not descendants of the Huguenots, and