Sylvia half expected that he would tell her to go away and come back when she had learned how to behave in the confessional; now that she was here, she felt that this would be a pity, and she was relieved when he began the _Confiteor_ in an impersonal voice, waiting for her to repeat every sentence after him. His patience seemed to her almost miraculous in the way it smoothed her difficulties. "I shall have to give you a short history of my life," Sylvia began. "I can't just say baldly that I've done this or not done that, because nearly all the sins I've committed weren't committed in their usual classification." As she said this, she had a moment of acute self-consciousness and wondered if the priest were smiling, but he merely said in that far-away, impersonal voice: "I am listening, my daughter." "I was brought up a Catholic. I was baptized and confirmed and I made my first communion. It was the only communion I ever made, because somehow or other at home there was always work to be done in the house instead of going to Mass. My mother was French and she married an Englishman much younger than herself. Of this marriage I was the only child. My mother had six other daughters, two by a lover who died, and four by her first husband, who was a Frenchman. My mother was illegitimate; her father was also an Englishman. I only knew this after she died. The man who married my grandmother always acknowledged her as his own daughter. My mother was very strict and, though she was not at all religious, she was very good. I don't want to give the idea that she was responsible for anything I did. The only thing is, perhaps, that, being passionately in love with my father, she was very demonstrative in front of me, which made the idea of passion shocking to me when I was still young. Therefore, for whatever sins of the flesh I have committed I cannot plead a natural propensity. I don't know whether this would be considered to make them worse or not. My father was a weak man; when my mother died, he robbed his employers and had to leave France, taking me with him. I was twelve at the time. I suppose if I wanted to justify myself, I could say that no child could have spent a more demoralizing childhood from that moment. But though, when I look back at it now and realize some of the horrible actions that my father and a friend of his who lived with us committed, I can't think that at the time they influenced me toward evil. I suppose that any kind of moral callousness _is_ a bad example, and certainly I had no conception that swindling people out of money was anything but a perfectly right and normal procedure for anybody who was without money. My mother was angry with me once because by accident I spent some money of hers, but she was angry with me because it was a serious loss to the household accounts: there was no suggestion of my having spent money that did not belong to me. Other things that my father and his friend did I never understood at the