CHAPTER X.
MY INTRODUCTION TO MRS. GRUNDY.
For a few days I got on in London in the most delightful manner. I enjoyed a prestige and popularity in my aunt’s circle—whether on account of my reputed heiress-ship, or my French dresses, or my personal attractions, or because I was a surprising colonial curiosity, I cannot say—which would have charmed and gratified the least vain of girls, and I was on the way to becoming anything but that. I was taken to the park, and the opera, and the Royal Academy, and the Albert Hall, and Westminster Abbey, driven in an open carriage through the enchanted streets and the lovely summer weather, in a state of rapturous enjoyment of the novelty of everything and the fulness and brightness of my new life, that no words can adequately describe. I went to Madame Tussaud’s and the Zoological Gardens too, surreptitiously, with daddy, at an abnormal hour, and I could have gone on sight-seeing all night, if any one would have taken me. For, thanks to the vigour of my constitution, I never knew what it was to be tired.
But after a few days I got into trouble, and this is how it was:—
One morning—it was either a Friday or a saint’s day—Eleanor, who would have lived in a church if she could, came to ask me if I would go to service with her, and I readily complied, though I had never done such a thing on such a day before, except on Good Fridays and Christmas Days, in all my life. As we walked unattended through the quiet streets and squares, I (naturally) thought of Tom going to College Chapel, and I asked Eleanor to tell me about Christchurch, and whether she ever went to see Bertie when he was there. She would have been sure to go to the cathedral, of course, and perhaps she had met Tom, who had had a slight acquaintance with his younger fellow-student. But Eleanor drifted off into reminiscences of an Oxford sisterhood, of which she had some thoughts of becoming a humble associate, if her father would allow her, and told me how the sisters spent their noble lives in teaching the young, and nursing the sick, and reclaiming the fallen, until her face flushed and glowed with enthusiasm.
I became interested in the subject, though it was not the one I looked for, and especially in the picturesque sketches that she gave of their many little services in their tiny chapel, and their meals in the great bare refectory, and their little white-washed black-floored dormitories, with the crucifix on the wall over each narrow truckle bed. My heart was stirred to hear how many of them had given up wealth and high position for this lowly but sacred work, and how gentle ladies scrubbed the floors and cooked the dinners for the families of the poor wretched men and women whom they went to nurse in the filthy slums and alleys. My fancy was attracted also by her description of the lovely needlework that they did for the church, in those scanty hours when their severe rules of self-discipline allowed them to sit down and rest together. But, after all, it was not a thing that I could realize—women doing without fathers and mothers and the tenderness of home life, and not wishing to be married; and this was a side of the subject that I could not for a moment approve of. “They must just be like old children,” I ventured to remark, thinking what hard restrictions they put upon the development of that human nature which should be (perhaps above everything) sacred, but which suffers so many indignities always at the hands of good people. “Life must seem very small to them, poor things.”
“Small!” echoed Eleanor. “Oh, Kitty, it is the very greatest and highest life, to give up yourself entirely to the work of God.”
“It seems to me they only want to teach God a better way of doing things, and I think His own way is quite good enough, for my part.”
“What way?”
“The common way, making things better as you go along, and enjoying yourself all the while.”