Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin

wasn’t long before the two friends were riding their horses over to Littlemore, a village just outside of Oxford, to visit a Catholic priest Fiona had been consulting about a possible vocation.
    Now, Littlemore, you remember, was where John Henry Newman had experienced the crisis of conscience that led him to leave the Church of England and become a Catholic. His conversion in 1845 changed the religious complexion of the nation. In the forty-four years to follow, the Catholic Church became the church educated middle-class people in England were attracted to. No longer was Catholicism just for Irish immigrants and stubborn old Catholic aristocrats who had survived Henry VIII’s dissolution.
    Growing up in western Ireland, Fiona had always felt so at home inside her Catholicism that she had never really examined it. Being Catholic was the same to her as being a Galway Finney. Unlike Elizabeth, Fiona was not an intellectual or a scholar, but now she mustered all her powers of mind to examine her religion in order to convert Elizabeth. Because by now it was clear to both of them that they had vocations. And they felt certain that they could accomplish more staying together and supporting each other than going off to be nuns in different religions.
    Elizabeth went back to Cowley to see Father Maturin a number of times and talk with him about her growing interest in the Catholic Church. The more she came to know about the Catholic faith, through worshipping with Fiona and through her own reading—she devoured Newman’s Apologia and afterward wrote her own spritely commentary on the book of Acts—the clearer it seemed to Elizabeth that the straightest, purest line was that which stretched between the church Peter and Paul had worked so tirelessly to establish and the present-day Catholic Church.
    It would be wonderful to have listened in on Elizabeth Wallingford’s talks with Father Maturin, because, as we know, he himself converted to Catholicism in 1897. By that time Mother Wallingford and Mother Finney had taken their final vows and established their Order under the aegis of the Benedictines and were running their first academy for girls in Boston. You can’t help wonder to what degree Elizabeth Wallingford’s avid questionings led her famous mentor to follow her example!
—from Mount St. Gabriel’s Remembered: A Historical
   Memoir , by Mother Suzanne Ravenel

CHAPTER 8
The Pungent Ache of the Soul
    Monday evening, October 15, 1951
Pine Cone Lodge
Mountain City, North Carolina
    MAUD NORTON HAD always loved reading, but David Copperfield was , introducing her to the idea that someone else’s story, if told a certain way, could make you ache as though it were your own.
    From the lodge’s screened porch three floors below, her mother’s coquettish murmurs alternated with Mr. Foley’s oily baritone replies. Maud was glad their words were inaudible. The rhythms themselves were bad enough. It was still warm enough for them to sit out on the porch if they wore wraps. The mingled aromas of Lily Norton’s cigarette and Mr. Foley’s cigar floated up into the open window of Maud’s “ivory tower,” as Lily preciously called it. The tower room was too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and you had to go down steep circular stairs to get to the bathroom, but Maud treasured its remoteness from the rest of Pine Cone’s compromised life. Despite the room’s coming winter chill, she looked forward to the hard frost, when the porch furniture down there would be covered with plastic and turned to the wall and her mother and Mr. Foley would be forced to carry on their furtive courtship indoors or downtown at the movies.
    Art Foley, who sold fancy foods (“choice comestibles,” his brochure said) for a wholesale company based in Atlanta, was a star boarder at the Pine Cone from the second Tuesday to the third Monday in every month. He had the prize corner bedroom with its own bath. He brought them gift baskets full