"Father Quinnailion's Convert"

• Originally appeared in Good Company, V, No. 1 (1880). 
• Suffrage is the cause of a lovers' quarrel.
• Parallel of Catholicism and Suffragist cause.
• Focus on the poor.
• Similar tension between old world and America. Harold Durham's mother is into butlers and other symbols of English life but Harold is trying to move forward. 
• Dr. Jerusha Dale is notable here; Harold is angry that she and Lily are friends, and he misses the good qualities of the muscular physician. His prejudices blind him: "Harold unfortunately knew nothing of her amiable traits" (p. 113). At the end of the story, the narrator foreshadows the eventual change in Harold's view of Dr. Dale.
• The parallel is pretty obvious when Harold tells Lily: " he tells Lily “if I had heard you were a Roman Catholic I couldn’t have been more shocked” (p. 142).
• ​Father Q shows up in a play by Thanet (per McMichael's list of "unpublished/unlocated" works). I have not located a script.

Basic Plot Summary: Harold Durham has just been dumped by Lilian "Lily" Maines because she couldn't "give up my friends and my convictions for you" (p. 134). Lily is part of the suffrage movement, and we find that Harold attempted to attend a meeting (p. 110) but found the women coarse. He is surprised to learn Lily is pro-suffrage, as her hair is not cut short (p. 142). 

Traveling from Chicago to Xerxes to repair his father's tenement buildings, Harold meets Father Quinnailion and befriends him, after struggling a lot with his image of what Catholics are like versus the example Father Q. shows him. After he realizes that Catholics are not horrible heretics who pray to Mary and other saints, he realizes, too, that he was wrong to want to force Lily to "convert" and give up her principles.

I been unjust and cruel to you? By Jove, I'm not only a bigot but a snob; I needed Father Quinnailon to take the worldliness out of me . What right had I to ask Lily to give up her principles? It was just the same conceited stuff as my wanting those poor creatures in the church to give up the religion which helps them to bear their hard lives! (p. 171)

McMichael, interestingly, doesn't discuss or analyze this story. This is significant given his overall argument that Thanet was anti-suffrage for women. This story seems to present things in a more complex light--Harold and Lily reconcile at the end and true love wins, despite the differences in principles.