‘I wonder,’ she said, forgetting for the moment she was speaking to Cecilia, ’I wonder none of those Brennans married; you can’t call them ugly girls, and they have some money.  How dreadfully lonely they must be living there by themselves!’

‘I think they are far happier as they are,’ said Cecilia, and her brown eyes set in liquid blue looked strangely at Alice as she helped her over the low wall.  The girls walked in silence through the stillness of the silver firs, their thoughts as sharp as the needles that scratched the pale sky.

’It may seem odd of me to say so—­of course I would not say this to anyone but you—­but I assure you, even if I were as tall as you are, dear, nothing would induce me to marry.  I never took the slightest pleasure in any man’s conversation.  Do you?  But I know you do,’ she said, breaking off suddenly—­’I know you like men; I feel you do.  Don’t you?’

’Well, since you put it so plainly, I confess I should like to know nice men.  I don’t care for those I have met hitherto, particularly those I saw at dinner the other night; but I believe there are nice men in the world.’

‘Oh! no there aren’t.’

’Well, Cecilia, I don’t see how you can speak so positively as that; you have seen, as yet, very little of the world.’

’Ah, yes, but I know it; I can guess it all, I know it instinctively, and I hate it.’

‘There is nothing else, so we must make the best of it.’

’But there is something else—­there is God, and the love of beautiful things.  I spent all day yesterday playing Bach’s Passion Music, and the hours passed like a dream until my sisters came in from walking and began to talk about marriage and men.  It made me feel sick—­it was horrible; and it is such things that make me hate life—­and I do hate it; it is the way we are brought back to earth, and forced to realize how vile and degraded we are.  Society seems to me no better than a pigsty; but in the beautiful convent—­that we shall, alas! never see again—­it was not so.  There, at least, life was pure—­yes, and beautiful.  Do you not remember that beautiful white church with all its white pillars and statues, and the dark-robed nuns, and the white-veiled girls, their veils falling from their bent heads?  They often seemed to me like angels.  I am sure that Heaven must be very much like that—­pure, desireless, contemplative.’

Amazed, Alice looked at her friend questioningly, for she had never heard her speak like this before.  But Cecilia did not see her; the prominent eyes of the mystic were veiled with strange glamour, and, with divine gourmandise, she savoured the ineffable sweetness of the vision, and, after a long silence, she said: 

’I often wonder, Alice, how you can think as you do; and, strange to say, no one suspects you are an unbeliever; you’re so good in all except that one point.’

’But surely, dear, it isn’t a merit to believe; it is hardly a thing that we can call into existence.’