She spoke slowly--awe-fully. It was a strange speech for a girl in
her nineteenth year. But she was a girl in this nineteenth century,
also; and she had caught some of the thoughts and questions of it,
and mixed them up with her own doubts and unsatisfactions which they
could not answer.

"The world is full of mistakes; mistakes centuries long; but it is
full of salvation and setting to rights, also. 'The kingdom of
heaven is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal
till the whole was leavened.' You have been _allowed_ to be, Desire
Ledwith. And so was the man that was born blind. And I think there
is a colon put into the sentence about him, where a comma was meant
to be."

Desire did not ask him, then, what he meant; but she turned to the
story after he had gone, and found this:--

"Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works
of God should be manifest in him."

You can see, if you look also, where she took the colon out, and put
the comma in.

Were all the mistakes--the sins, even--for the very sake of the pure
blessedness and the more perfect knowledge of the setting right?

Desire began to think that Uncle Oldways' theology might help her.

What she said to him now was,--