To all the pettiness of the little petty quarrels that were galling the dignity of the age, her clear intellect was too contemptuous to give more than a passing thought. The symbols and the forms, the chief source of the wrangles and squabblings, were no trouble to her, had the things on which they were founded been deep and large with truth. With the greyness of mind, that made of these things a sin, she had no more sympathy than with the narrowness of head that made of them an important part of life.... She had wandered one day into a Quakers’ meeting-house--had been struck with the deep religious atmosphere, the far deeper mysticism than that of her own Church, for all its splendid forms and ceremonial and great beauty of service. She had not felt her reason sullied by the interposition of any gross human body between the Christ and her nobility. She had felt the wondrous dignity of the simple service, in spite of the greyness. She had read of late a novel, a vulgar stupid book, in which a child brought up by an agnostic is made to commit suicide because it cannot believe in a hereafter--in hell. Her reason revolted at the shabby trick, for she saw that no child would commit suicide because there was not a hell; but rather because there was--indeed, she herself remembered that she had suffered torments at night and had wept until her nerves were shaken for fear of hell, and out of compassion for the poor lost souls--nay, had reeled before the brutality that had created these poor souls only to fling them to such hellish predestined doom for all eternity. This literary trash roused her to the feeble foundations of sand on which much so-called religious life is built--especially the religious side of women. For the book had a wide sale. Creeds are an affair of race. They that are of a master race will hold a master creed--they that are of a sloven race will bow to sloven gods. It is the attribute of a slave people to pay homage from fear. This girl was of the master peoples. It was impossible for her to enslave her mind or her body or her soul with the blind credulities. She was of the mighty race that has bred the Protestors. With the passing of her childhood she put away the toys of the childhood of the world. In no bitter or harsh temper, but with affection and sadness she put them away--and took a deeper breath of life. In monastic cells and blind gropings in dark corners where life is a denial, and in the shirking of contradictions, very God is not to be found; but out in the free fresh air of the great world. The truth cannot lie. The girl roused in the dusk of the dying day and took the beautiful image of the Mary, and went down with it to the little old faded lady’s room, and set it upon the mantel there, that it might bring happiness to one whose sweet mind had not passed beyond these things.