e.
It was one of the few relics of their father's Puritanism surviving in
them. Of "Catholics" they had been accustomed to speak since childhood
as of nightmares and Red Indians with bloody scalps at their waists; and
perhaps that instinctive terror of the subtle heart of Rome is the
religious prejudice which we will do well to part with last.

Dot had not, indeed, contemplated an apostacy so unnatural; but beneath
these comparatively trivial words there was an ever-growing impulse to
fulfil that old longing of her nature to do something, as the Christians
would say, "for God," something serious, in return for the solemn and
beautiful gift of life. By an accident, she had met Sister Agatha one
day in the house of an old Irish servant of theirs, who had been
compelled to leave them on account of ill-health, and on whom she had
called with a little present of fruit. She had been struck by the
sweetness of the Sister's face, as the Sister had been struck by hers.
Sister Agatha had invited Dot to visit her some day at the home for
orphan children of which she had charge; and, with some misgiving as to
whether it was right thus to visit a Catholic, whether even it was
safe, Dot had accepted. So an acquaintance had grown up and ripened into
a friendship; and Sister Agatha, while making no attempt to turn the
friendship to the account of her church, was a great consolation to the
lonely, religious girl.

Dot retained too much rationalism ever to become a Catholic, but the
longing to do something grew and grew. At a certain moment, with each
new generation of girls, there comes an epidemical desire in maiden
bosoms to dedicate their sweet young lives to the service of what Esther
called "horrible dirty people." At these periods the hospitals are
flooded with applications from young girls whom the vernal equinox urges
first to be mothers, and, failing motherhood, nurses. Just before she
met Henry, Angel had done her best to miss him by frantic endeavours to
nurse people whom the hospital doctors decided she was far too slight a
thing to lift,--for unless you can lift your patients, not to say throw
them about, you fail in the muscular qualifications of a hospital nurse.
Dot, as we have seen, was impelled in this direction from no merely
sentimental impulse, unless the religious impulse, which paradoxically
makes nuns of disappointed mothers, may so be called. Perhaps,
unacknowledged, deep down in her heart, she longed to be the