"Look here, Lily darling, don't run away with the idea that I want to—to destroy your faith, or any nonsense of that sort. I've never studied these questions, and I don't know anything about theology and all the rest of it. It's quite right you should go to church, and religion is a great comfort to a woman sometimes. I know that."
He nodded with an air of great sagacity.
Lily wondered whether religion would ever be a great comfort to her, should she require comfort. And why should Nicholas specify such comfort as applicable to a woman rather than to a man?
She did not consciously dwell upon the matter for very long, but gradually became accustomed to view the question in the way that her husband evidently did, as a purely temperamental one. It was not long, moreover, before Lily perceived that Nicholas was far from being alone in his point of view. It was shared by the majority of the people belonging to the world in which she now moved with her husband.
On the whole it was a relief to feel that there were other opinions than those held by Philip Stellenthorpe, Ethel Hardinge, or Miss Melody. The friends of Nicholas, indeed, more nearly approximated in their views to the startling enunciations of Aunt Clo, whose unconventionalities of diction soon began to acquire, in the retrospect, a character of the merest commonplace.
Lily sometimes told herself, with a certain amount of secret complacency, that she really was a grown-up Person at last.
It gave her an agreeable sense of dignity to receive in her own house the people who had loomed largest upon the horizon of her childhood.
Miss Melody, allowing herself a summer holiday on the Continent, broke her journey in order to spend an hour or two with her erstwhile pupil, and was frankly captivated by the mingled courtesy and cheery good-fellowship shown towards her by Nicholas.
"He makes me think of Chaucer's 'verrye parfit gentil knyghte,'" she said to Lily. "Childe dear, I feel the better for seeing you in your happiness."
Cousin Ethel, less classically, admitted to deriving similar benefit.