“Oh! if you are so fond of improvement,” cried Polly, “I daresay you would like to have Mr. Sterndale the Scripture Reader come and read to us; or we might ask Mr. Langton upstairs, who is a clergyman. I shouldn’t mind having _him_; he is so shy and frightened, and he wouldn’t know what to say.” “Lord!” cried Kate; “fancy being frightened for us!” “Oh!” said the better-informed Polly, “there’s heaps as are frightened for us; and the gooder they are the more frightened they would be; a curate is always frightened for us girls. He knows he daren’t talk free in a friendly way, and that makes him as stiff as two sticks. As sure as fate, if he was pleasant, somebody would say he had a wrong meaning, and that’s how it’s always in their mind.” “A clergyman,” said Ellen authoritatively, “would come to do us good. But it wouldn’t be his place to come here visiting. It’s our duty to go to him to relieve our consciences. As for Mr. Sterndale, the Scripture Reader, I don’t call him a Churchman at all; he might just as well be a Dissenter. What good can he do anybody? The thing that really does you good is to go to church. In some places there are always prayers going on, and then there is half an hour for meditation, and then you go to work again till the bell rings. And in the afternoon there is even-song and self-examination, and that passes the time,” cried Ellen, clasping her hands. “What with matins, and meditation, and something new for every hour, the days go. They’re gone before you know where you are.” The young women were silenced by this enthusiastic statement. For after all, what could be more desirable than a system which made the days fly? Polly was the only one who could hold up her head against such an argument. She did her best to be scornful. “I daresay!” she cried, “but I should just like to know if the work went as fast! Praying and meditating are very fine, but if the work wasn’t done, what would your mother say?” “Mother would find it answer, bless you,” said Ellen, her pale face lighted with enthusiasm; “you do double the work when you can feel you’re doing your duty, and could die cheerful any moment.” “Oh! and to think how few sees their duty, and how most folks turns their backs upon it!” replied the little apprentice, who was on Ellen’s side. Polly saw that something must be done to turn the tide. The girls were awed. They could not hold up their commonplace little heads against this grand ideal. There were little flings of half-alarmed impatience indeed among them, as when Kate whispered to ’Liza that “one serious one was enough in a house,” and little Emma ventured a faltering assertion “that going to church made a day feel like Sunday, and it didn’t seem right to do any more work.” Polly boldly burst in, and threw forth her standard to the wind.