It is very unfortunate the boys should come to me with their religious perplexities, because I am so perplexed myself, I have no idea how to answer them. I generally advise them to ask Eva.
This time I could only say, as our grandmother had so often said to me,—
"You must wait till you are older, and then you will understand." But I added, "Of course it is quite different: one leaves his home for God, and the other for the world."
But Christopher is the worst, and he continued,—
"Sister Elsè, I do not like the monks at all. You and Eva and our mother have no idea how wicked many of them are. Reinhardt says he has seen them drunk often, and heard them swear, and that some of them make a jest even of the mass, and that the priests' houses are not fit for any honest maiden to visit, and,—
"Reinhardt is a bad boy," I said, colouring; "and I have often told you I do not want to hear anything he says."
"But I, at all events, shall never become a monk or a priest," retorted Christopher; "I think the merchants are better. Woman cannot understand about these things," he added, loftily, "and it is better they should not; but I know; and I intend to be a merchant or a soldier."
Christopher and Pollux are fifteen, and Fritz is two-and-twenty; but he never talked in that lofty way to me about women not understanding!
It did make me indignant to hear Christopher, who is always tearing his clothes, and getting into scrapes, and perplexing us to get him out of them, comparing himself with Fritz, and looking down on his sisters; and I said, "It is only boys who talk scornfully of women. Men, true men, honour women."
"The monks do not!" retorted Christopher. "I have heard them say things myself worse than I have ever said about any woman. Only last Sunday, did not Father Boniface say half the mischief in the world had been done by women, from Eve to Helen and Cleopatra?"