“Dear, dear!” sighed Mrs. Ginx, “what a name!”
“We wish him to be kept from any worldly taint, and by-and-by his saintliness may gain you forgiveness in spite of your heretical perversity. I cannot permit you to give him unconsecrated milk, and as we wish to treat you kindly, the holy Father Certificatus has allowed me to make an arrangement with you, to which you can have no objection—I mean, that you should let me make the sign of the cross upon your breasts morning and evening before you suckle your infant. You will permit me to do that, won't you?”
Conceive of Mrs. Ginx's reply, clothed in choice Westminster English: it asserted her readiness to cut off her right hand, her feet, to be hanged, drowned, burned, torn to pieces, in fact to withstand all the torments ascribed by vulgar tradition to Roman Catholic ingenuity, and to see her baby “a dead corpse” into the bargain, before she would submit her Protestant bosom to such an indignity.
“No, mum!” she said; “I couldn't sleep with that on my breast;” and cried hysterically.
This lower class heretic WAS “brutally refractory.” So thought the Superioress, and so gave Mrs. Ginx notice to come no more. She went home rather jubilant—she was a martyr.
II.—The Protestant Detectoral Association.
Ginx's baby was now fed on consecrated pap. But his mother was not a woman to be silent under her wrongs. From her husband she hid them, because the subject was forbidden. She poured out her complaint to Mrs. Spittal and other Protestant matrons. Thus it came to pass that one day, in Ginx's absence, the good woman was surprised by a visit from a “gentleman.” He was small, sharp, rapid, dressed in black. He opened his business at once.
“Mrs. Ginx? Ah! I am the agent of the Protestant Detectoral Association.”
Mrs. Ginx wiped her best chair and set it for him.