Our heroine has thus been brought to her twenty–fourth year. The present is hard and unkindly around her. Suspicion, neglect, and all the anxious ignoble cares attendant on poverty, had by a sudden scene–shifting taken the places of luxurious ease, admiration, flattery, and troops of friends. The future was dark and precarious. The bad times were every day becoming worse for those on whom any taint of heresy had ever rested. [Sidenote: POOR MUSE!] In short, our gifted Muse stood bare and desolate, and shivering in the midst of a very unharmonious world in most sad and pitiable plight. But the salvation question was beginning to be answered. CHAPTER VI. The question fully answered at last.—Farewell, Ferrara!—Welcome inhospitable Caucasus.—Omne solum forti patria est. Yes! the question was beginning to get answered; beginning, not more as yet. The process of life–discipline, which was to "save" Olympia, to rescue the fine moral gifts and capabilities from suffocation in an element of unrealities, dream–life and Undine–Museship, and to develope the latent capacities of nobleness in her nature, and set her well forward in the Godward path, which shall be, Faith hopes, pursued hereafter,—this was beginning to make its operation appreciable. The baptism of tears had done much. Olympia herself thought that the question had been already answered satisfactorily and in full. She had "got religion," as certain modern sectaries phrase it. And though the special peculiarities of her creed, as professed by her hierophants, are as little calculated to elevate the heart, or enlarge the understanding, as any theory of divine world–governance can well be imagined to be, the religion she had got was a persecuted religion, and derived from that fact an immense saving power, not naturally its own. But creeds are shown unmistakeably enough to have their home and fatherland in the brain, by the constant exhibition of their powerlessness over the heart; which persists in willing good or evil with most illogical independence of the brain's theories. And human beings accordingly wear their creeds with a difference. Thus these lamentable election and predestination theories, mad and ungodly as they may be, as intellectual beliefs, yet, by the virtue of the persecution with which they were visited,—a virtue addressing itself directly to the heart—served to commence the work of Olympia's rescue from heathendom. But other influences were needed for the maturing of the noble picture of womanhood which her completed career offers us. And these were now ready at her need. [Sidenote: THOUGHT BEGINS TO QUIT ITALY.]