She went to bed, and fell asleep from very weariness of emotion. But
presently she started awake again; and, strange to say, it seemed to be
a resolution she had formed in her sleep that brought her awake. It was
that she would go to Mr. Fuller, and consult him on the subject that
distressed her. After that she slept till the morning.
She had no lesson to give that day, so as soon as Mr. Fuller's
church-bell began to ring, she put on her bonnet. Her grandmother asked
where she was going. She told her she was going to church.
"I don't like this papist way of going to church of a week-day--at
least in the middle of the day, when people ought to be at their work."
Lucy made no reply; for, without being one of those half of whose
religion consists in abusing the papists, Mrs. Boxall was one of those
who would turn from any good thing of which she heard first as done by
those whose opinions differed from her own. Nor would it have mitigated
her dislike to know that Lucy was going for the purpose of asking
advice from Mr. Fuller. She would have denounced that as _confession_,
and asked whether it was not more becoming in a young girl to consult
her grandmother than go to a priest. Therefore, I say, Lucy kept her
own counsel.
There were twenty or thirty people present when she entered St.
Amos's; a grand assembly, if we consider how time and place were
haunted--swarming with the dirty little demons of money-making and
all its attendant beggarly cares and chicaneries--one o'clock in the
City of London! It was a curious psalm they were singing, so quaint
and old-fashioned, and so altogether unlike London in the nineteenth
century!--the last in the common version of Tate and Brady. They were
beginning the fifth verse when she entered:
"Let them who joyful hymns compose
To cymbals set their songs of praise;
Cymbals of common use, and those
That loudly sound on solemn days."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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