"I don't believe I ever was," Sylvia said, "if the nuns had known I'd have been expelled from the Holy Child."
"You would not," the Father said. "Do stop your boasting. The nuns have too much sense. . . . Anyhow, it isn't a pure young girl I'd have you or behaving like a Protestant deaconess for the craven fear of hell. I'd have ye be a physically healthy, decently honest-with-yourself young devil of a married woman. It's them that are the plague and the salvation of the world."
"You admire mother?" Mrs. Tietjens asked suddenly. She added in parenthesis: "You see you can't get away from salvation."
"I mean keeping bread and butter in their husband's stomachs," the priest said. "Of course I admire your mother."
Mrs. Satterthwaite moved a hand slightly.
"You're at any rate in league with her against me," Sylvia said. She asked with more interest: "Then would you have me model myself on her and do good works to escape hell fire? She wears a hair shirt in Lent."
Mrs. Satterthwaite started from her doze on the edge of her chair. She had been trusting the Father's wit to give her daughter's insolence a run for its money, and she imagined that if the priest hit hard enough he might, at least, make Sylvia think a little about some of her ways.
"Hang it, no, Sylvia," she exclaimed more suddenly. "I may not be much, but I'm a sportsman. I'm afraid of hell fire; horribly, I'll admit. But I don't bargain with the Almighty. I hope He'll let me through; but I'd go on trying to pick men out of the dirt—I suppose that's what you and Father Consett mean—if I were as certain of going to hell as I am of going to bed to-night. So that's that!"
"'And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!'" Sylvia jeered softly. "All the same I bet you wouldn't bother to reclaim men if you could not find the young, good-looking, interestingly vicious sort."
"I wouldn't," Mrs. Satterthwaite said. "If they didn't interest me, why should I?"