great pity, for it is one of my best things; the features I might alter,
and yet it is very hard to do so, without losing the character. I wonder
if I were to make the nose straighter. Alice, dear, would you mind
turning your head this way?'

'Oh! no, no, no, papa dear! You aren't going to put my face upon it!'
And she ran from the room smothered with laughter.

When this little quarrel was over and done, and Olive had ceased to
consider herself a disgraced girl, the allusion that had been made to
Mass as a means of meeting Captain Hibbert remained like a sting in
Alice's memory. It surprised her at all sorts of odd moments, and often
forced her, under many different impulses of mind, to reconsider the
religious problem more passionately and intensely than she had ever done
before. She asked herself if she had ever believed? Perhaps in very
early youth, in a sort of vague, half-hearted way, she had taken for
granted the usual traditional ideas of heaven and hell, but even then,
she remembered, she used to wonder how it was that time was found for
everything else but God. If He existed, it seemed to her that monks and
nuns, or puritans of the sternest type, were alone in the right. And yet
she couldn't quite feel that they were right. She had always been
intensely conscious of the grotesque contrast between a creed like that
of the Christian, and having dancing and French lessons, and going to
garden-parties--yes, and making wreaths and decorations for churches at
Christmas-time. If one only believed, and had but a shilling, surely the
only logical way of spending it was to give it to the poor, or a
missionary--and yet nobody seemed to think so. Priests and bishops did
not do so, she herself did not want to do so; still, so long as Alice
believed, she was unable to get rid of the idea. Teachers might say what
they pleased, but the creed they taught spoke for itself, and prescribed