rch,
to which Deruchette herself, as we have said, only went on the four
great festivals of the year.

On the whole, these little concessions, which always cost him a pang,
irritated him; and far from inclining him towards the Church people,
only increased his inward disinclination to them. He compensated himself
by more raillery. His nature, in general so devoid of bitterness, had no
uncharitable side except this. To alter him, however, was impossible.

In fact, this was in his very temperament, and was beyond his own power
to control.

Every sort of priest or clergyman was distasteful to him. He had a
little of the old revolutionary want of reverence. He did not
distinguish between one form of worship and another. He did not do
justice to that great step in the progress of ideas, the denial of the
real presence. His shortsightedness in these matters even prevented his
perceiving any essential difference between a minister and an abbe. A
reverend doctor and a reverend father were pretty nearly the same to
him. He used to say, "Wesley is not more to my taste than Loyola." When
he saw a reverend pastor walking with his wife, he would turn to look at
them, and mutter, "a married priest," in a tone which brought out all
the absurdity which those words had in the ears of Frenchmen at that
time. He used to relate how, on his last voyage to England, he had seen
the "Bishop_ess_" of London. His dislike for marriages of that sort
amounted almost to disgust. "Gown and gown do not mate well," he would
say. The sacerdotal function was to him in the nature of a distinct sex.
It would have been natural to him to have said, "Neither a man nor a
woman, only a priest;" and he had the bad taste to apply to the Anglican
and the Roman Catholic clergy the same disdainful epithets. He
confounded the two cassocks in the same phraseology. He did not take the
trouble to vary in favour of Catholics or Lutherans, or whatever they
might be, the figures of speech common among military men of that
period. He would say to Deruchette, "Marry whom you please, provided you
do not marry a parson."

XIII

THOUGHTLESSNESS ADDS A GRACE TO BEAUTY

A word once said, Mess Lethierry remembered it: a word once said,
Deruchette soon forgot it. Here was another difference between the uncle
and the niece.

Brought up in the peculiar way already described, Deruchette was little
accustomed to responsibility. There is a latent danger in an education