“Have you any title? Are you known on earth at all by the name of Saint?”
She shook her head.
“No, I don’t think so. I rarely go there. I should have been a saint, I think, but I missed it by one solitary laugh. You see, I am so very old that when I was young we had to educate ourselves. Now I, being very foolish, thought it was only wrong to laugh at age, or weakness, or pain, or infirmity of some sort. And one day I laughed at the High Priest; he looked so different in his robes from what he did without them. No one ever forgave me, not even the great absolver himself. So I walked through life quite solitary, and was not sorry when I came to die.”
“But in heaven they received you?”
“Yes. The next thing I remember was, I was running about gardens similar to ours, quite young again. When I was old enough to marry my husband said he was pleased I escaped the Saintship, as it made me more pliable in disposition. I thought he meant to imply I had no stamina, and so we quarrelled. It was our first and most delightful quarrel; I can remember every word of it to this day, though I believe it is quite three thousand years ago.”
“You acknowledge quarrelling to be legitimate?”
“Of course, provided it is carried on on a right principle, but otherwise it becomes a very deadly and terrible thing. We have had one such quarrel in heaven, and its results have been such as to cause widespread grief; if possible we would avoid another.”
When breakfast was over Virginius left us, as he said, to write letters. I, having no such thing to do, asked Sunbeam to show me the gardens. But this was evidently contrary to the general arrangements for the day.
“I can’t go out to play till the work is done,” she said.
“But there is no work to do.”