Many lonely women receive great solace from their church, and give solace in return. Where would the church and the poor be without them? But Henrietta was never long enough in her caravanserais to become attached to the services of the chaplains in the _salle a manger_, and she soon gave up churchgoing. At first she spent a great deal of time inventing reasons to keep her conscience quiet, such as that it had rained in the night and therefore might rain again, or that she did not approve of chanting Amen, but later she did not see why there should be a reason, and left her conscious to its remorse. Bad health is another resource for unoccupied women, and it certainly occurred to her as an occupation, but she realized that it and roving cannot be combined, and of the two she preferred roving. Her chief pastime was to skim through novels, any novels that could be found, costume novels of English history by preference. This was how her bent for learning satisfied itself. She never remembered the author, or title, or anything of what she read, but at the same time she was obsessed with the idea that she must always have something new, and would constantly accuse her friends, or the library, of deceiving her with books she had read before. "If you can't remember, what does it matter?" her dreadfully reasonable nieces would exclaim, not realizing that her sole interest in the novels was the collector's interest of seeing how many new ones she could find. A second pastime was her patience, that bond which knits together our occidental civilization. She was always learning new patiences, and always mixing them up with one another. This was another source of annoyance to efficient nieces. "But that is not demon, Aunt Etta," they would explain, playing patience severely from a sense of duty. She cheated so persistently that there was no room for skill. "I can't conceive why you play," they said crossly. But the reason was perfectly clear. It stared one in the face. During the patience the clock had moved from ten minutes past eight to twenty-five minutes to ten.