'Will it? But it will still be there--the awful thing I did. I ought to confess it, oughtn't I, and get absolution? I do make my confession, you know, but I've never told this, not properly. I know I ought to have done, but I couldn't get it out ever--I put it so that the priest couldn't understand. I suppose it was awfully mean and cowardly of me, and I ought to confess it properly.' But I couldn't go into that question, not being entirely sure even now _what_ she ought to confess. I merely said, 'Well, why make confessions at all if you don't make them properly?' She only gave her little soft quivering sigh. It was too difficult a question for her to answer. And, after all, a foolish one to ask. Why do we do all the hundreds of things that we don't do properly? Reasons are many and motives mixed. I walked with her to the King's Cross bus and saw her into it. We shook hands as we parted, and hers was hot and clinging. I saw that she was all tense and strung up. 'Good-bye,' she whispered. 'And thank you ever so much for being so good to me. I'll do what you told me to-night. If it kills me, I will.' 'That's good,' I returned. 'But it won't kill you, you know.' I smiled at her as she got on to the bus, and she smiled pitifully back. 5 I walked back to my rooms. I felt rather tired, and had a queer feeling of having hammered away on something soft and yielding and yet unbreakable, like putty. I felt sick at having been so hard, and sick too that she was so soft. Sick of words, and phrases, and facile emotions, and situations, and insincerities, and Potterisms--and yet with an odd tide of hope surging through the sickness, because of human nature, which is so mixed that natural cowards will sometimes take a steep and hard way where they might take an easy one, and because we all, in the middle of our egotism and vanity and self-seeking, are often sorry for what we have done. Really sorry, beneath all the cheap penitence which leads nowhere. So sorry that we sometimes cannot bear it any more, and will break up our own lives to make amends.... And if, at the same time, we watch our sorrow and our amends, and see it as drama and as interesting--well, after all, it is drama and it is interesting, so why not? We can't all be clear and steely unsentimentalists like Katherine Varick. One has to learn to bear sentimentalism. In parishes (which are the world) one has to endure it, accept it. It is part of the general muddle and mess. 6