id, forgetting for the moment she was speaking to
Cecilia, 'I wonder none of those Brennans married; you can't call them
ugly girls, and they have some money. How dreadfully lonely they must be
living there by themselves!'

'I think they are far happier as they are,' said Cecilia, and her brown
eyes set in liquid blue looked strangely at Alice as she helped her over
the low wall. The girls walked in silence through the stillness of the
silver firs, their thoughts as sharp as the needles that scratched the
pale sky.

'It may seem odd of me to say so--of course I would not say this to
anyone but you--but I assure you, even if I were as tall as you are,
dear, nothing would induce me to marry. I never took the slightest
pleasure in any man's conversation. Do you? But I know you do,' she
said, breaking off suddenly--'I know you like men; I feel you do. Don't
you?'

'Well, since you put it so plainly, I confess I should like to know nice
men. I don't care for those I have met hitherto, particularly those I
saw at dinner the other night; but I believe there are nice men in the
world.'

'Oh! no there aren't.'

'Well, Cecilia, I don't see how you can speak so positively as that; you
have seen, as yet, very little of the world.'

'Ah, yes, but I know it; I can guess it all, I know it instinctively,
and I hate it.'

'There is nothing else, so we must make the best of it.'

'But there is something else--there is God, and the love of beautiful
things. I spent all day yesterday playing Bach's Passion Music, and the
hours passed like a dream until my sisters came in from walking and
began to talk about marriage and men. It made me feel sick--it was
horrible; and it is such things that make me hate life--and I do hate
it; it is the way we are brought back to earth, and forced to realize
how vile and degraded we are. Society seems to me no better than a
pigsty; but in the beautiful convent--that we shall, alas! never see
again--it was not so. There, at least, life was pure--yes, and
beautiful. Do you not remember that beautiful white church with all its
white pillars and statues, and the dark-robed nuns, and the white-veiled
girls, their veils falling from their bent heads? They often seemed to
me like angels. I am sure that Heaven must be very much like that--pure,
desireless, contemplative.'

Amazed, Alice looked at her friend questioningly, for she had never
heard her speak like this before. But Cecilia did not see her; t