"I'd like her to be a good girl, yes."
"But how can she be good till she has found the Lord? We're none of us good," declared Miss Mary, "till we have been washed in the blood of the Lamb."
"I quite believe you're in earnest, Aunt Alice," declared Mrs. Raeburn, "in earnest, and anxious to do well by Jenny, but I don't hold and never did hold with cooping children up. Poor little things!"
"There wouldn't be any cooping up. As a child of grace, she would often go out walking with her aunts, and sometimes, perhaps often, be allowed to carry the tracts."
Mrs. Raeburn looked down in the round blue eyes of Jenny.
"Perhaps you'd like her to jump to glory with a tambourine?" she said.
"Jump to glory with a tambourine?" echoed Miss Horner.
"Or bang the ears off of Satan with a blaring drum? Or go squalling up aloft with them saucy salvation hussies?"
The austere old ladies were deeply shocked by the levity of their niece's inquiries.
Sincerely happy, sincerely good, they were unable to understand any one not burning to feel at home in the whitewashed chapel which to them was an abode of murmurous peace. They wanted everybody to recognize with glad familiarity every text that decorated the bleak walls with an assurance of heavenly joys. Their quiet encounters with spiritual facts had nothing in common with those misguided folk who were escorted by brass bands along the shining road to God. They were happy in the exclusiveness of their religion, not from any conscious want of charity, but from the exaltation aroused by the privilege of divine intimacy and the joyful sense of being favorites in heavenly places. The Rev. Josiah Williams, for all his liver-colored complexion and clayey nose, was to them a celestial ambassador. His profuse outpourings of prayer took them higher than any skylark with its quivering wings. His turgid discourses, where every metaphor seemed to have escaped from a store's price-list, were to them more fruitful of imaginative results than any poet's song. His grave visits, when he seemed always to be either washing his hands or wiping his boots, left in the hearts of the three old maids memories more roseate than any sunset of the Apennines. Therefore, when Mrs. Raeburn demanded to know if they were anxious for Jenny to jump to glory with a tambourine, the religious economy of the three Miss Horners was upset. On consideration, even jumping to glory without a tambourine struck them as an indelicate method of reaching Paradise.