"I hardly think," she said, stroking her muff and looking very ladylike, "that I shall take such an important step in life until I am older."
"But," I objected, "how can anything be more important?"
"It's your soul, Pauline!" Flora Haines was slightly scandalized.
"That's just the reason; it's so important my mother thinks I ought not to take any steps until I can give it my most mature judgment."
Flora Haines and I looked at one another silently; we might have known Pauline's mother wouldn't let her do anything so common as get converted.
CHAPTER VI
I was duly taken into the church on the following Sabbath, to the great relief of my family, having for once exhibited the normal reaction of a young person in my circumstances, and though I have laid much to the door of that institution of the retarding of my development and the dimming of the delicate surface of happiness, I think now it was not wholly bad for me. If I hadn't up to this time found any way of being good by myself, I was now provided with a criterion of conduct toward which even those who hadn't been able to manage it for themselves, moved a public approbation. I have heard my mother say that even Mr. Farley, the banker, who read books on evolution and was a Freethinker (opprobrious term), had been known to pronounce the church an excellent thing for women.
The church left you in no doubt about things. You attended morning and evening service; as soon as you were old enough for it, which was before you were fit, you taught in Sunday school; you waited on table at oyster suppers designed for the raising of the minister's salary, and if you had any talent for it you sang in the choir or recited things at the church sociables. And when you were married and consequently middle-aged, you joined the W. F. M. S. and the Sewing Society.
It was after the incident of the coal-hole that I began to experience this easy irreproachability, and to build out of its ready-to-hand materials a sort of extra self, from which afterward to burst was the bitter wound of life. For my particular church went farther and provided a chart for all the by-lanes of behaviour. "You were never," said the evangelist, whose relish of the situation on the day that a score or so of us had renounced the devil and all his works, gave me a vague sensation of having made a meal and licked his lips over us, "you should never go anywhere that you could not take your Saviour with you," and when I saw Cousin Judd wag at my mother and she smile and pat her hymn book, I was apprised that we had come to the root of the whole matter.