does not tend to the glory of God is vain and harmful.  Far better these hideous hymns, if singing them conducts to everlasting life.  But every time she pressed her mind towards an inevitable conclusion, it turned off into an obscure bypath.  She brought it back like an intractable ass, but the stubborn beast again dodged her, and she had to abandon the attempt to convince herself that art which did not tend to the honour and glory of God should be suppressed—­should be at least avoided.  Once we were convinced that there was a God and a resurrection, this world must become as nothing in our eyes, only it didn’t become as nothing in our eyes; every sacrifice should become easy, but every sacrifice didn’t become easy.  That was the point; to these nuns, perhaps, not to her.  At least not yet.

She had fussed a great deal this morning because she had no hot water to wash with.  Seven o’clock had seemed to her somewhat early to get up.  But they had been up long before.  She had heard of nuns who got up at four in the morning to say the Office.  She did not know what time these nuns got up, but she felt that she was not capable of much greater sacrifice than six or seven o’clock.  These nuns lived on a little coarse food, and spent the day in prayer.  She thought of their aching knees in the long vigils of their adorations.  She understood that the inward happiness their life gives them compensates them for all their privations.  She understood that they are the only ones who are happy, yet the knowledge did not help her; she felt that she would never be happy in their happiness, and a great sorrow came over her.  Mass was over, and again the beautiful procession, with bowed heads and meekly folded veils, glided out of the church.  Only the watchers remained.

Last night she had sat watching the stars shining on the convent garden.  There were, as Owen said, twenty millions of suns in the Milky Way; beyond the Milky Way there were other constellations of which we know nothing, nebulae which time has not yet resolved into stars, or stars so distant that time has not yet brought their light hither.  But why seek mystery beyond this poor planet?  It furnishes enough, surely.  That we should see the stars, that we should know the stars, that we should place God above the stars—­are not these common facts as wonderful as the stars themselves?  That those twenty or five-and-twenty women should give up all the seduction of life for the sake of an idea, accepting Owen’s theory that it is but an idea, even so the wonder of it is not less; even from Owen’s point of view is not this convent as wonderful as the stars?