had been made to
Mass as a means of meeting Captain Hibbert remained like a sting in
Alice's memory. It surprised her at all sorts of odd moments, and often
forced her, under many different impulses of mind, to reconsider the
religious problem more passionately and intensely than she had ever done
before. She asked herself if she had ever believed? Perhaps in very
early youth, in a sort of vague, half-hearted way, she had taken for
granted the usual traditional ideas of heaven and hell, but even then,
she remembered, she used to wonder how it was that time was found for
everything else but God. If He existed, it seemed to her that monks and
nuns, or puritans of the sternest type, were alone in the right. And yet
she couldn't quite feel that they were right. She had always been
intensely conscious of the grotesque contrast between a creed like that
of the Christian, and having dancing and French lessons, and going to
garden-parties--yes, and making wreaths and decorations for churches at
Christmas-time. If one only believed, and had but a shilling, surely the
only logical way of spending it was to give it to the poor, or a
missionary--and yet nobody seemed to think so. Priests and bishops did
not do so, she herself did not want to do so; still, so long as Alice
believed, she was unable to get rid of the idea. Teachers might say what
they pleased, but the creed they taught spoke for itself, and prescribed
an impossible ideal--an unsatisfactory ideal which aspired to no more
than saving oneself after all.

Lies and all kinds of subterfuge were strictly against her character.
But it was impossible for her to do or say anything when by so doing she
knew she might cause suffering or give pain to anyone, even an enemy;
and this defect in her character forced her to live up to what she
deemed a lie. She had longed to tell the truth and thereby be saved the
mummery of attending at Mass; but when she realized the consternation,
the agony of mind, it would cause the nuns she loved, she held back the
word. But since she had left the convent she had begun to feel that her
life must correspond to her ideas and she had determined to speak to her
mother on this (for her) all-important subject--the conformity of her
outer life to her inner life. The power to prevail upon herself to do
what she thought wrong merely because she did not wish to wound other
people's feelings was dying in her. Sooner or later she would have to
break away; a