oydenish at times, and although convent-trained, she was
inclined to balk at restraint in any form. But there was a softness
lurking in her blue eyes that was most sympathetic and human.

St. Timothy's and the convent school in Germantown had been the choice
of her parents for her education--what they called a good Catholic
education. She had learned a great deal about the theory and forms of
the Catholic ritual, but she could not understand them. The church, with
its tall, dimly radiant windows, its high, white altar, its figure of
St. Joseph on one side and the Virgin Mary on the other, clothed in
golden-starred robes of blue, wearing haloes and carrying scepters, had
impressed her greatly. The church as a whole--any Catholic church--was
beautiful to look at--soothing. The altar, during high mass, lit with a
half-hundred or more candles, and dignified and made impressive by the
rich, lacy vestments of the priests and the acolytes, the impressive
needlework and gorgeous colorings of the amice, chasuble, cope, stole,
and maniple, took her fancy and held her eye. Let us say there was
always lurking in her a sense of grandeur coupled with a love of color
and a love of love. From the first she was somewhat sex-conscious. She
had no desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. Innate
sensuousness rarely has. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells
in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there. Accuracy
is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive natures,
when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True controlling
sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active dispositions, nor
again in the most accurate.

There is need of defining these statements in so far as they apply
to Aileen. It would scarcely be fair to describe her nature as being
definitely sensual at this time. It was too rudimentary. Any harvest is
of long growth. The confessional, dim on Friday and Saturday evenings,
when the church was lighted by but a few lamps, and the priest's
warnings, penances, and ecclesiastical forgiveness whispered through
the narrow lattice, moved her as something subtly pleasing. She was not
afraid of her sins. Hell, so definitely set forth, did not frighten her.
Really, it had not laid hold on her conscience. The old women and old
men hobbling into church, bowed in prayer, murmuring over their beads,
were objects of curious interest like the wood-carvings in the peculiar