"Why, if it hadn't been for that, and sitting for the figure, I should have felt myself good enough to marry your son, although I was only a blanchisseuse de fin—you've said so yourself!
"And I should have made him a good wife—of that I feel sure. He wanted to live all his life at Barbizon, and paint, you know; and didn't care for society in the least. Anyhow, I should have been equal to such a life as that! Lots of their wives are blanchisseuses over there, or people of that sort; and they get on very well indeed, and nobody troubles about it!
"So I think I've been pretty well punished—richly as I've deserved to!"
"Trilby, have you ever been confirmed?"
"I forget. I fancy not!"
"Oh dear, oh dear! And do you know about our blessed Saviour, and the Atonement and the Incarnation and the Resurrection...."
"Oh yes—I used to, at least. I used to have to learn the Catechism on Sundays—mamma made me. Whatever her faults and mistakes were, poor mamma was always very particular about that! It all seemed very complicated. But papa told me not to bother too much about it, but to be good. He said that God would make it all right for us somehow, in the end—all of us. And that seems sensible, doesn't it?
"He told me to be good, and not to mind what priests and clergymen tell us. He'd been a clergyman himself, and knew all about it, he said.
"I haven't been very good—there's not much doubt about that, I'm afraid. But God knows I've repented often enough and sore enough; I do now! But I'm rather glad to die, I think; and not a bit afraid—not a scrap! I believe in poor papa, though he was so unfortunate! He was the cleverest man I ever knew, and the best—except Taffy and the Laird and your dear son!
"There'll be no hell for any of us—he told me so—except what we make for ourselves and each other down here; and that's bad enough for anything. He told me that he was responsible for me—he often said so—and that mamma was too, and his parents for him, and his grandfathers and grandmothers for them, and so on up to Noah and ever so far beyond, and God for us all!