ardening; in that
curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise
farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a
religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to
the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people
proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued
about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical
thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her
neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident,
brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all
that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more
puzzling than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green
velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called
artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an
attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she
hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost
blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much
that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She
never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" of Yeats or
Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody else. She was intelligent, with a great
love of literature, and especially of Stevenson. But if Stevenson had
walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal
immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon
the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected. She was
not at all like Robespierre, except in a taste for neatness in dress;
and yet it is only in Mr. Belloc's book on Robespierre that I have
ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her
off from the current culture and saved her from it. "God had given
him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were
preserved imperishable."*

[* _Autobiography_, pp. 151-3.]

A letter to a friend, Mildred Wain, who was now engaged to Waldo
d'Avigdor, makes the future tolerably easy to foresee.

. . . My brother wishes me to thank you with ferocious gratitude
for the music, which he is enjoying tremendously. It reminds me
rather of what Miss Frances Blogg--but that is another story.

In your last letter you enquired whether I saw anything of the
Bloggs now. If