e said; "even your own
beautiful father had to be bowed down to and worshiped. We put up with
it in him, of course; but I never did see one that didn't think of
himself first. It is their selfishness that causes all the sorrow of the
world to women. We needn't have lost your angel mother but for Mr.
Anderton's selfishness--a kind, hard, rough man--but as selfish as a
gentleman."

It seemed a more excusable defect to Priscilla in the upper class, but
had no redeeming touch in the status of Mr. Anderton.

Halcyone, however, had a logical mind and reasoned with her nurse:

"If they are _all_ selfish, Priscilla, it must be either women's fault
for letting them be, or God intended them to be so. A thing can't be
_all_ unless the big force makes it."

This "big force"--this "God" was a real personality to Halcyone. She
could not bear it when in church she heard the meanest acts of revenge
and petty wounded vanity attributed to Him. She argued it was because
the curate did not know. Having come from a town, he could not be
speaking of the same wonderful God she knew in the woods and fields--the
God so loving and tender in the springtime to the budding flowers, so
gorgeous in the summer and autumn and so pure and cold in the winter.
With all that to attend to He could not possibly stoop to punish
ignorant people and harbor anger and wrath against them. He was the
sunlight and the moonlight and the starlight. He was the voice which
talked in the night and made her never lonely.

And all the other things of nature and the universe were gods,
also--lesser ones obeying the supreme force and somehow fused with Him
in a whole, being part of a scheme which He had invented to complete the
felicity of the world He had created--not beings to be prayed to or
solicited for favors, but just gentle, glorious, sympathetic, invisible
friends. She was very much interested in Christ; He was certainly a part
of God, too--but she could not understand about His dying to save the
world, since the God she heard of in the church was still forever
punishing and torturing human beings, or only extending mercy after His
vanity had been flattered by offerings and sacrifices.

"I expect," she said to herself, coming home one Sunday after one of Mr.
Miller's lengthy discourses upon God's vengeance, "when I am older and
able really to understand what is written in the Bible I shall find it
isn't that a bit, and it is either Mr. Miller can't see straigh