"Well, maybe she will another time."

"Do you think there'll be a lot of 'another time's for you here?"

"...I guess I kind of have no idea what my next, like, week, will look like."

She nods.  "The main thing I'd think about when deciding whether you want to stay at a convent or someone's house is how hard you expect to find not being able to speak the same language as everyone around you."  She gathers her jacket and bag from the pew's seat.  "Let's go get some pastries."

"Ugh, I stayed in a convent in England for a while." She swaps Catherine onto the other breast. "I liked the singing and everything else about it was awful. My parents had my baby the whole time."

"That sucks.  Someone will help you find a place that isn't awful, and if it turns out to be awful anyway you can go to a different one."

"That's good... I don't know how good I am at learning languages."

"When Christ Sernes comes to town you could prevail upon her to make you better at it."

"She just comes to town every so often like a circus?"

"She's scheduled to in a month but it's her first time coming here.  There are a lot of places and only one of her."

"Wow. Is there like a festival for her or...?"

"Kind of.  She got tired pretty quickly of having nothing but festivals in her honor everywhere she went, but there's still a gathering and an event schedule."  Thekla heads for the outside opening of the pew which her grandparents already left from, since Rebecca is still blocking the middle one.  "Let's go downstairs?  I fast before sunrise services and I want a shot at the good pastries.  Unless there's a reason you don't want to."

"Oh, sure." Down they go.

Thekla gets two paper plates and goes through the line, filling one with a selection of non-chocolate cookies and turnovers and the other with whatever Rebecca wants.  She always uses tongs instead of touching anything with her hands.

What a fastidious custom. Rebecca has been introduced to chocolate just now and is very much in favor.

The hall is nowhere near full capacity; Thekla gets them an empty table.  "How did you like the service?" she asks once they're sat.

"The pretty parts were super pretty but I was confused about a lot of it! Who's the Lady? We pay lots of attention to Mary, our Christ's mother, but I'd gotten the idea that your three didn't all have the same one."

". . . They have the same heavenly mother, in God, but different worldly ones.  The Lady's another name for Her."

"Oh, so it's just part of the same thing as saying God's a her."

"Well, yes.  Is yours not?"

"No, He's a Him."

"Huh...  Is there a lot of sexism in your world?"

"I don't know the word."

"When either of men or women get treated worse than the other, because they're men, or women."

"Well, we're... different, obviously? I don't see how you'd figure one was better off than the other."