"How delicious it is here!" she said, after dismissing him to the billiard-room. "I never lie in bed after a ball, do you, Di? I seem to crave for the sunshine and the face of nature after all the glitter and the worldliness of a ball-room."
"I don't find ball-rooms more worldly than other places—than this bench, for instance."
"Now, how strange that is of you, Di! This spot is quite sacred to me. I come and read here."
Madeleine had, by degrees, sanctified all the seats in the garden; had taken the impious chill even off the iron ones, by reading her little manuals on each in turn.
"It was here," continued Madeleine, "that I persuaded dear Fred to go into the Church. It was settled he was to be a clergyman ever since he had that slight stroke as a boy; but when he went to college he must have got into a bad set, for he said he did not think he had a vocation. And mother—you know what mother is—did not like to press it, and the whole thing was slipping through, when I had him to stay here, and talked to him very seriously, and explained that a living in the family was the call."
"Madeleine," said Di, rising precipitately, "it is getting late. I must fly and pack."
If she stayed another moment she knew she should inevitably say something that would scandalize Madeleine.
"And I did not say it," she said with modest triumph that evening, as she sat in her grandmother's room before going to bed; having rejoined her at Garstone, a relation's house, whither Mrs. Courtenay had preceded her. "I refrained even from bad words. Granny, you know everything: why is it that the people who shock me so dreadfully, like Madeleine, are just the very ones who are shocked at me? You are not. All the really good earnest people I know are not. But they are. What is the matter with them?"
"Oh, my dear, what is the matter with all insincere people? It is only one of the symptoms of an incurable disease."
"But the being shocked is genuine. They really feel it. There is something wrong somewhere, but I don't know where it is."