^*One of Toklas’s biographers has in fact noted that while Toklas “explained to friends that she had been baptized as a child…there is little likelihood of that early baptism…Alice’s claim of returning to the religion of her childhood had been made, most likely, for expediency…Her embrace of Catholicism, in any case, was not a return to the security of her childhood beliefs, but the fulfillment of her need for an all-consuming passion, an ordered pattern of life, and, most of all, for the conception of a populated heaven where she would find Gertrude.” (Simon, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 237.)