And surely they were a most unpromising little crowd. Waifs, snatched
probably from some New York whirlpool of iniquity, and wearing the
brute mark on their faces, which nothing in this school of their
transplanting tended to erase--a sodden little party, like stupid
young beasts of burden, uncouth and awkward.

As the girls came round again, and I had settled it in my mind that
there was certainly no Bessie in the room, I could watch them more
calmly. Eagerly as I sought her face, it was a relief, surely, that it
was not there. Pale to ghastliness, most of them, with high, sharpened
shoulders, and features set like those of a corpse, it was indeed
difficult to realize that these ascetic forms, these swaying devotees,
were women--women who might else have been wives and mothers. Some of
them wore in their hollow eyes an expression of ecstasy akin to
madness, and there was not a face there that was not saintly pure.

It was a strange union that assembled under one roof these nun-like
creatures, wasted and worn with their rigid lives, and the heavy,
brutish men, who shambled round the room like plough-horses. _Wicked_
eyes some of them had, mere slits through which a cunning and selfish
spirit looked out. Some faces there were of power, but in them the
disagreeable traits were even more strongly marked: the ignorant,
narrow foreheads were better, less responsible, it seemed.

The singing ended, there was a sermon from a high priest who stood out
imperious among his fellows. But this was not a sermon to the flock.
It was aimed at the scanty audience of strangers with words of
unblushing directness. How men and women may continue pure in the
constant hearing and repetition of such revolting arguments and
articles of faith is matter of serious question. The divine instincts