'Let me see,' said Gertrude. 'Woman working every one for her own hand, is all nohow, either grim or silly, the laughing-stock of gods and men; while working for the Church makes all harmonious, and sets each in her place.'

'It might as well be man as woman,' said Lance.

'More so, I believe,' said Cherry; 'because marriage gives woman a head; so I think the married ones at least do not suffer so much in character from misbelief. Family life affords a sort of religion to those who do not know the truth; and so while man kept them in subjection, they did not need to think it out, as the single ones must do now.'

'The Church provides ties and object for them,' said Gertrude. 'Ethel would like that.'

'Clan Hepburn would more than ever warn one against making an idol of an abstraction,' said Lance. 'I couldn't help asking them what they thought of the Bride in the Revelation, and they warned me against taking the figurative literally; but they are deeply good old girls, though your St. Sophia has not had the training of them.'

'Not consciously,' said Cherry. 'They did her work, though, in the dark times; and if she had thorough hold of them, they would not be meddling with the clergyman's province.'

So saying, she produced two more finished copies, the building elaborately put in, and some of the faces and figures worked up evidently from the life. Wilmet was the lovely matronly presiding spirit; Stella, the damsel in the place of one of the beautiful boys in the foreground of the School of Athens, though it had been hard to make her look naughty enough for the first. Gertrude, to her great amusement, recognised Lady Caergwent: 'So that's the use you make of your countesses?'

'It arose a good deal out of a talk with her about the dedication of our powers; and she sent me a horrible photograph to do her bad self by.'

'I declare you must have got Ethel's nut-cracker photograph for the original of that forbidding astronomical female with the compasses. Why! her improved state is Ethel herself, only not quite sweetly odd enough. Did you mean it?'

'No; I only found it coming like Dr. May.'