An anecdote I can empathize with

Evelyn Waugh, British novelist, who lived from 1903-66. Waugh was male, by the way. He converted to Catholicism in 1930. This was told by Joseph Epstein (an American essayist).

"Once, when he had behaved with particular rudeness to a young French intellectual at a dinner party in Paris at the home of Nancy Mitford, Miss Mitford, angry at his social brutality, asked him how he could behave so meanly and yet consider himself a believing and practicing Catholic. 'You have no idea,' Waugh returned, 'how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.'"