“You little heathen!”
“No, ma’am, I’m not. My father was very religious. But please don’t talk religion to me.”
“Patience, I don’t know what to make of you. I am in despair. You’re not a bad girl. You give me little trouble, and I’ve always said that you had finer impulses than any girl I’ve ever known, and the best brain. You ought to realise better than any girl of your age the difference between right and wrong. And yet you have done what not another girl in the school would do, inferior as they are—”
“How do you know, ma’am? I never thought I would. Neither did you think I would. You can’t tell what you’ll do till you do it.”
Miss Galpin was distracted. She resumed hurriedly:
“I want you to be a good woman, Patience,—a good as well as a clever woman. And how can you be good if you don’t love God?”
“Are all people good the same way?”
“Well, it all comes to the same thing in the end.” Miss Galpin blessed the evolution of verbiage.
“Are all religious people good?”
“Certainly.”