"Why not pray. I just asked him how he liked you; I wanted to get at his opinion, you see, and he answered, just as gravely as though he were mentor, that he thought I had chosen my friend wisely, that you seemed a thoroughly healthy-minded girl." "I think we will go into the church now," interrupted Queenie, somewhat irrelevantly. There was a little flush of pleasure in her cheek. She was glad he had said that; it was just the sort of praise she most coveted. She wanted Cathy's people to think well of her; if the truth must be known, she hungered for their appreciation as a half-starved child might have done. Crumbs would not satisfy her; condescension or kindness would not feed her thoroughly; she must have their full commendation, their equal friendship. She had known them so long, she had seen them all so perfectly with her inner vision, that she could not feel as a stranger amongst them. "I am so at home with them already," she had said to her friend the previous night. "There are no hard beginnings; we are friends to start with; there is no thawing, because there is no ice," she had said, with a certain vague enthusiasm, which, nevertheless, had been perfectly understood by Cathy. "One has so much hard up-hill work with most people," she had continued, talking out her thoughts half to herself. "Don't you know exactly how common-place people make acquaintance, how laboriously they try to find out one's tastes! They do it about as gracefully as though they were breaking stones on the highway, or hammering flints as boys do to elicit sparks, and all the time looking as though they knew you had nothing in you worth coming to light. Oh, it is terribly fatiguing. I once heard a very clever man liken modern society to the mummy-room of the British Museum. He said, 'Human beings were so swathed and bound up in conventionality that there was no getting at the real thing at all.'" "I like Langley's way of knowing people," Cathy had answered; "she just knows them at once, takes it for granted, I mean, that all that interests her interests them. We had such an argument about it one day, when I would have it that she had bored some one about the soup-kitchen. 'I was so full of it myself that I knew that I should not talk so well on any other subject,' was her sole apology. And then she told me I was quite wrong, 'that people, after all, liked to be treated as reasonable beings, and not like children pleased with sugar-plums. "Give, and it shall be given you," was just as true in social intercourse as it was in the sense first intended. If you sow tares you will reap tares, child; always remember that,' she had finished. I prefer scattering precious grain. You have no idea how often one reaps a rich harvest. It is the real thing, you see, and people like that."