"No, it is mine," she said. "I have had it here for some time, in a portfolio amongst others, and never took any particular notice of it. I just had an idea that it was an unpleasant and disagreeable subject. I never gave it a thought--what it really meant--until this morning, when he was talking to me, and happened to mention it. I remembered that I had it, and I got it out to look at it. Oh!" setting down her teacup and holding it fairly in both hands before her--"isn't it a terrible sermon? Isn't it heartbreaking to think that it is _true?_ And he says the truth is understated." Like the great Buddha, when he returned from his first excursion beyond his palace gates, Elizabeth's mind was temporarily darkened by the new knowledge of the world that she was acquiring, and she looked at the picture with a fast-beating heart. "Sphinxes set up against that dead wall," she quoted from a little printed foot-note, "and none likely to be at the pains of solving them until the general overthrow." She was leaning over her friend's shoulder, and the tears were dropping from her eyes. "They are Dickens's words," said Mrs. Duff-Scott. "Why is it like this, I wonder?" the girl murmured, after a long, impressive pause. "We must not think it is God's fault--that can't be. It must be somebody else's fault. It cannot have been _intended_ that a great part of the human race should be forced, from no fault of their own, to accept such a cruel lot--to be made to starve, when so many roll in riches--to be driven to crime because they cannot help it--to be driven to _hell_ when they _need not_ have gone there--if there is such a place--if there is any truth in what we have been taught. But"--with a kind of sad indignation--"if religion has been doing its best for ever so many centuries, and this is all that there is to show for it--doesn't that seem to say that _he_ may be right, and that religion has been altogether misinterpreted--that we have all along been making mistakes--" She checked herself, with a feeling of dismay at her own words; and Mrs. Duff-Scott made haste to put away the picture, evidently much disturbed. Both women had taken the "short views" of life so often advocated, not from philosophical choice, but from disinclination, and perhaps inability, to take long ones; and they had the ordinary woman's conception of religion as exclusively an ecclesiastical matter. This rough disturbance of old habits of thought and sentiments of reverence and duty was very alarming; but while Elizabeth was rashly confident, because she was inexperienced, and because she longed to put faith in her beloved, Mrs. Duff-Scott was seized with a sort of panic of remorseful misgiving. To shut that window had become an absolute necessity, no matter by what means.