nge paths:
would to God they were as uncommon as strange! Both she and the
vicar had a great wish that she should lead a 'devoted life;' but
then they both disdained to use common means for their object. The
good old English plan of district visiting, by which ladies can have
mercy on the bodies and souls of those below them, without casting
off the holy discipline which a home, even the most ungenial, alone
supplies, savoured too much of mere 'Protestantism.' It might be
God's plan for christianising England just now, but that was no
reason, alas! for its being their plan: they wanted something more
'Catholic,' more in accordance with Church principles (for, indeed,
is it not the business of the Church to correct the errors of
Providence!); and what they sought they found at once in a certain
favourite establishment of the vicar's, a Church-of-England
beguinage, or quasi-Protestant nunnery, which he fostered in a
neighbouring city, and went thither on all high tides to confess the
young ladies, who were in all things nuns, but bound by no vows,
except, of course, such as they might choose to make for themselves
in private.

Here they laboured among the lowest haunts of misery and sin,
piously and self-denyingly enough, sweet souls! in hope of 'the
peculiar crown,' and a higher place in heaven than the relations
whom they had left behind them 'in the world,' and unshackled by the
interference of parents, and other such merely fleshly
relationships, which, as they cannot have been instituted by God
merely to be trampled under foot on the path to holiness, and cannot
well have instituted themselves (unless, after all, the Materialists
are right, and this world does grind of itself, except when its
Maker happens to interfere once every thousand years), must needs
have been instituted by the devil. And so more than one girl in
that nunnery, and out of it, too, believed in her inmost heart,
though her 'Catholic principles,' by a happy inconsistency, forbade
her to say so.

In a moment of excitement, fascinated by the romance of the notion,
Argemone had proposed to her mother to allow her to enter this
beguinage, and called in the vicar as advocate; which produced a
correspondence between him and Mrs. Lavington, stormy on her side,
provokingly calm on his: and when the poor lady, tired of raging,
had descended to an affecting appeal to his human sympathies,
entreating him to spa