There were her sins against faith.  She had striven to undermine her belief in God.  She had read Darwin and Huxley for this purpose, and not in the least to obtain knowledge.  As Monsignor has said, “When a Catholic loses his faith, it is because he desires to lead a loose life,” and she hardly dared to look into her soul, knowing that she would find confirmation of this opinion.  She had not been to Mass, because at the Elevation she believed in spite of herself; so she had been as insincere in her unfaith as in her faith.  Then there were the sins of the flesh, and their number and their blackness terrified her.  There were sins that she strove to put out of her mind at once, sins she was even ashamed to think of; and the thought of confessing them struck her down, and once more it seemed that she could never raise herself out of the slough into which she had fallen.  She had all along taken it for granted that a general admission that she had lived with Owen as his wife would be sufficient.  But now it seemed to her that she would have to tell Monsignor how gross her life had been.

In a corner of the room her sins crowded, and covering her face with her hands, she was convinced that she could not go to confession.

Before she went away with Owen she had had no sins to confess, or only venial sins; that she had been late for Mass through her own fault; that she had omitted her evening prayers.  Her worst sin was the reading of a novel which she thought she ought not to have read, but now her life was all sin.  If the priest questioned her she could not answer, she must refuse to answer.  So there seemed no hope for her.  She could not confess everything, and the conviction suddenly possessed her that God had deserted her, and she could not hope for redemption from her present life.  For she could not confess all her sins; her heart would fail her, she would be tempted to conceal something, and then to her other sins she would add the sin of a bad confession.

Nervous pains began again in her arms and neck, and she experienced the same wasting away of the very substance of her being, of the protecting envelope of the unconscious.  She was again a mere mentality, and she looked round the room with a frightened, distracted air.  On the table was the book Monsignor had given her, Sin and Its Consequences.  But she turned from it with a smile.  She did not need anyone to tell her what were the consequences of sin—­and the familiar proverb of bringing coals to Newcastle rose up in her mind.  At the same moment she caught sight of the clock; it was half-past twelve, and she remembered that in about three hours and a half it would be time to go to St. Joseph’s.  Then like a flash the question came, was it Monsignor’s influence that had induced this desire of a pure life in her?  She could not deny to herself that she was attracted by his personality.  So the question was, how far his personality accounted for the change