they were to expect no more subscriptions. To the children, she
was more tender; nearly all of them she supported till the age of
apprenticeship or domestic service. You see, she was childless
herself.

She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to
blame. She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family,
and they had forced upon her poor dear Edward without making
the stipulation that the children should be brought up as Catholics.
And that, of course, was spiritual death to Leonora. I have given
you a wrong impression if I have not made you see that Leonora
was a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English
Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help disliking this religion; there is
always, at the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the feeling
of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that filtered in upon me in
the tranquility of the little old Friends' Meeting House in Arch
Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good deal of Leonora's
mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the peculiarly
English form of her religion. Because, of course, the only thing to
have done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until
he became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe,
chance love affairs upon the highways. He would have done so
much less harm; he would have been much less agonized too. At
any rate, he would have had fewer chances of ruining and of
remorse. For Edward was great at remorse. But Leonora's English
Catholic conscience, her rigid principles, her coldness, even her
very patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all wrong in this
special case. She quite seriously and naïvely imagined that the
Church of Rome disapproves of divorce; she quite seriously and
naïvely believed that her church could be such a monstrous and