the schools. But he was governed by heart and imagination no less than
Laura. A serviceable intelligence had been used simply to strengthen the
claims of feeling and faith. Such as it was, however, it knew itself. It
was at command.

But Laura!--Laura was the pure product of an environment. She represented
forces of intelligence, of analysis, of criticism, of which in themselves
she knew little or nothing, except so far as they affected all her modes
of feeling. She felt as she had been born to feel, as she had been
trained to feel. But when in this new conflict--a conflict of instincts,
of the deepest tendencies of two natures--she tried to lay hold upon the
rational life, to help herself by it and from it, it failed her
everywhere. She had no tools, no weapons. The Catholic argument
scandalised, exasperated her; but she could not meet it. And the personal
prestige and fascination of her lover did but increase with her, as her
feeling grew more troubled and excited, and her intellectual defence
weaker.

Meanwhile to the force of temperament there was daily added the force of
a number of childish prejudices and dislikes. She had come to Bannisdale
prepared to hate all she saw there; and with the one supreme exception,
hatred had grown at command. She was a creature of excess; of poignant
and indelible impressions. The nuns, with their unintelligible virtues,
and their very obvious bigotries and littlenesses; the slyness and
absurdities of Father Bowles; the priestly claims of Father Leadham; the
various superstitions and peculiarities of the many priests and religious
who had passed through the house since she knew it--alas! she hated them
all!--and did not know how she was to help hating them in the future.
These Catholic figures were to her so many disagreeable automata, moved
by springs she could not possibly conceive, and doing perpetually the