'Perhaps he has done right,' said Lucy. 'A man ought never to go into the Church unless he feels that he is called. Papa might have been Senior Wrangler, but he felt his vocation was the Church. He gave up everything for it, and——' 'And mamma' she was going to say, but she looked at Pamela and stopped short.
'It would be all very well if the Church were going to last,' she said wearily; 'but it isn't. Everybody knows that it isn't. Nobody but women and children believe in it now. Its methods are all exploded; its teaching is preposterous; it has had its day, like other beliefs, and now a new day is dawning. Oh, it was ridiculous of Eric to go into the Church just as it was falling to pieces!'
Lucy was past expressing an opinion. The milking-stool had collapsed. The three idiotic legs had all gone different ways; it had fallen quite to pieces, like the Church was going to, and Lucy was seated on the floor.
AFTER CHAPEL.
The day succeeding the debate was Sunday, and Lucy went over to St. Benedict's to morning chapel.
She was so glad to go. It was quite a relief to get outside Newnham and shake from her skirts the atmosphere of so much learning. It was a distinct relief to take her place in the stalls of St. Benedict's and look down upon the men who took life so much more easily.
She was only just in time for the college chapel. The bell was going as she crossed the court, and the men were hurrying in in their white surplices. They were all smiling and debonair. There wasn't a single cloud on the brow of one of them, except the cloud of last night's tobacco. They were lusty and strong and fresh-coloured, and some of them had frames like giants; and they came across the court with a swinging stride, and health and life and vigour in every movement. Men take things so much more easily than women.