"Oh, why not, Miss Hartill? I'm nearly fourteen."
"Are you really?" said Clare, with respect.
"He does, Louise! That's his little way. But he's not for the Upper Fifth."
"He's in the Free Library," said Louise, with a twinkle. Clare turned.
"You can have all the books you want, if you come to me. But no more Free Library, Louise. You understand? I don't wish it."
Louise tingled like a bather under a cold spray. She liked and disliked the autocratic tone.
"I detest trash--and there's a good deal, even in a Carnegie collection. There's no need for you to dull your imagination on melodrama like--what was it?"
"The play you began to tell me about--you thought it horrible, you said."
"Miss Hartill, it wasn't melodrama--it was good stuff. That's why it worried me. It's by a Norwegian or a Dane or some one. _Pastor Sang_ it's called."
"That? I don't follow. I should have thought the theology would have bored you, but there's nothing horrible in it."
"It worried me. Oh, Miss Hartill, what does it all mean? Darwin says, we just grew--doesn't he? and that the Bible's all wrong. But you say that doesn't matter--it's just Old Testament? And this play says--do you remember? the wife is ill--and the husband, who cures people by praying--he can't cure her----"
"And he says, if the apostles did miracles, we ought to be able to--he kills his wife, trying. He can't, you see. But the point is, if he couldn't, with all his faith--could the apostles? And if the apostles couldn't, could Christ Himself? The miracles are just only a tale, perhaps?"
"Perhaps," said Clare. "You're not clear, Louise, but I know what you mean."
"It frightened me, that play," said the child in a low voice. "If there were no miracles--and everything one reads makes one sure there weren't--why, then, the Bible's not true! Jesus was just a man! He didn't rise? Perhaps there isn't an afterwards? Perhaps there isn't God?"
The child's eyes were wide and frightened. She put her hand timidly on Clare's knee.
Louise spoke again; her voice had grown curiously apprehensive.
"If _you_ don't believe in God----" she began slowly, and then stopped.
Clare felt uncomfortable. She had not intended to express any opinion, to let her own attitude to religion appear. But Louise, with her sudden question, had forced one from her. After all, if Louise had begun to doubt and to inquire, no silence on Clare's part would stop her.... Every girl went through the phase--with Louise it had begun early, that was all.... Yet in her heart she knew that Louise, with her already overworked mind, should have been kept from the mental distress of religious doubt.... She knew that for some years she could have been so kept; that, as the mouth can eat what the body will not absorb, so, though her intelligence might have assimilated all the books she chose to read, her soul need not necessarily have been disturbed by them. Her acquired knowledge that the world is round need not have jostled her rule of thumb conviction that it is flat. Her interest in 'ologies and 'osophies could have lived comfortably enough, with her child's belief in four angels round her head, for another two or three years--strengthening, maturing years.
