“Give up what?” Cissy’s voice was very low. There might be pain and disappointment in it, but there was no weakness.
“Oh, all this standing out against the nuns. You can go on, if you like being starved and beaten and made to kneel on the chapel floor, and so forth; but I’ve stood it as long as I can. And—wait a bit, Cis; let me have my say out—I can’t see what it signifies, not one bit. What can it matter whether I say my prayers looking at yon image or not? If I said them looking at the moon, or at you, you wouldn’t say I was praying to you or the moon. I’m not praying to it; only, if they think I am, I sha’n’t get thrashed and sent to bed hungred. Don’t you see? That can’t be idolatry.”
Cissy was silent till she had felt her way through the mist raised by Will’s subterfuge into the clear daylight of truth.
“Shall I tell you what it would be, Will?”
“Well? Some of your queer notions, I reckon.”
“Idolatry, with lying and cheating on the top of it. Do you think they make it better?”
“Cis, don’t say such ugly words!”
“Isn’t it best to call ugly things by their right names?”
“Well, any way, it won’t be my fault: it’ll be theirs who made me do it.”
“Theirs and yours too, Will, if you let them make you.”