"If you will read the last two verses of the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, you will know."
"I can't read in this light," said Christina, looking round the room, "and I don't know just where I have laid my Bible. Everybody goes to the Pincian. It's no harm."
"Would Mr. Shubrick go?"
"Who told you he wouldn't?" said Christina. "I declare, if you are going to help him in his crotchets, I won't let you see much of him! Sandie!—he's just an unmanageable, unreasonable bit of downrightness.—And uprightness," she added, laughing. "Dolly, he can have his own way aboard ship; but in the world one can't get along so. One must conform a little. One must."
"Does God like it?" said Dolly.
"What queer questions you ask! This is not a matter of religion; it is only living."
Dolly remembered words which came very inconveniently across Christina's principles; yet she was afraid of saying too much. She reflected that her friend was breathing the soft air of luxury, which is not strengthening, and enveloped in a kind of mist of conventionality, through which she could not see. With herself it was different. She had been thrown out of all that; forced to do battle with necessity and difficulty, and so driven to lay hold of the one hand of strength and deliverance that she could reach. What wonder if she held it fast and held it dear? while Christina seemed hardly to have ever felt the need of anything.
"Now, Dolly, tell me all about yourself," Christina broke in upon her meditations.
"There isn't much to tell."
"What have you been doing?"