most futile and foolish things. She knew, moreover, by a sure instinct,
that she had been unwelcome to them from the first moment of her
appearance, and that she was now a stumbling-block and a grievance to
them all.

Was she--by submission--to give these people, so to speak, a right to
meddle and dabble in her heart? Was she to be wept over by Sister
Angela--to confess her sins to Father Bowles--still worse, to Father
Leadham? As she asked herself the question, she shrank in sudden passion
from the whole world of ideas concerned--from all those stifling notions
of sin, penance, absolution, direction, as they were conventionalised in
Catholic practice and chattered about by stupid and mindless people. In
defiance of them, her whole nature stood like a charged weapon, ready to
strike.

For she had been bred in that strong sense of personal dignity which is
the modern substitute for the abasements and humiliations of faith. And
with that sense of dignity went reserve--the intimate conviction that no
feeling which is talked about, which can be observed and handled and
measured by other people, is worth a rush. It was what seemed to her the
spiritual intrusiveness of Catholicism, its perpetual uncovering of the
soul--its disrespect for the secrets of personality--its humiliation of
the will--that made it most odious in the eyes of this daughter of a
modern world, which finds in the development and dignifying of human life
its most characteristic faith.

There were many moments indeed in which the whole Catholic system
appeared to Laura's strained imagination as one vast _chasse_--an
assemblage of hunters and their toils--against which the poor human
spirit that was their quarry must somehow protect itself, with every