From Mrs. Starling's I went back to my old boarding-house, kept by Mrs. Kale, as a much cheaper one, in a much poorer neighborhood, where I was not asked to pay in advance, but paid at the end of the month by pawning my scarf-pins and shirt studs, and gradually everything else I had. I was brought up to go to church, my people having all been earnest Christians and devoted church people; but in my college years I had gone through the usual conceited phase of callow agnosticism; and partly from this intellectual juvenile disease and partly from self-indulgence, I had allowed the habit to drop into desuetude, and later, during my first years at the bar, I had been gradually dropping it altogether. My conscience, however, was never quite easy about it. My mother used to say that the promise as to training up a child in the way he should go was not to be fulfilled in youth, but in age, and as my years advanced, I began to find that the training of childhood counted for more and more. Lilian Poole, however, had no more religion than a cat. She wished to be comfortable and to follow the general habit of the feline class to which she belonged. She went to the Episcopal Church because it was fashionable, and whenever she had half an excuse she stayed away from church unless it were on a new-bonnet Sunday, like Easter or some such an occasion, when she made up by the lowness of her genuflexions and the apparent devoutness of her demeanor for all omissions. I must confess that I was very easily influenced by her at that time, and was quite as ready to absent myself from church as she was, though I should have had a much deeper feeling for her if she had not violated what I esteemed a canon of life, that women, at least, should profess religion, and if she had not pretended to have questionings herself as to matters as far beyond her intellect as the Copernican system or Kepler's laws. I remember quoting to her once Dr. Johnson's reply to Boswell, when the latter asked if Poole, the actor, were not an atheist: "Yes, sir, as a dog is an atheist; he has not thought on the matter at all." "Dr. Samuel Johnson?" she asked. "You mean the one who wrote the Dictionary?" and I saw that she was so pleased with her literary knowledge in knowing his name that she never gave a thought to the matter that we were discussing, so let it drop. As David said, that in his trouble he called upon the Lord, so now, in my solitude and poverty, I began once more to think on serious things, and when Sunday came I would dress up and go to church, partly in obedience to the feeling I speak of, and partly to be associated with people well dressed and good mannered, or passably so. The church I selected was a large stone edifice, St. ----'s, with a gilded cross on its somewhat stumpy spire, toward which I saw a richly clad congregation wending their way Sunday morning.