Although her tone was perfectly sweet and kind, it was dignified, and Carolina’s quickness at once comprehended the almost unbearable priggishness of her remark.
"I did not intend to be rude," she said, hurriedly. Then she hesitated as another thought struck her, and in a more timid voice she said:
"Did you mean that Christian Science does not need me as much as I need Christian Science?"
Rosemary pressed her hand as her only reply.
"Can it help me?" cried Carolina, with sudden fervour. "I am a wreck, physically and mentally. I have lost parents, fortune, home, health, and ambition. I long to die! I have even lost my God!"
"Christian Science will give you back your God," said Rosemary.
"I used to hate Him, too," said Rosemary. "In the old thought there was nothing else to do, for a just mind, than to hate Him. We had made an image of hate and vengeance and set it up to worship and called it God."
"It certainly is not God’s fault," said Rosemary. "He has declared Himself to be Love Incarnate. If we have been stupid enough to endow Him with human attributes of our own distorted imagination, is He to blame?"
"He never answered a prayer of mine in all my life!" cried Carolina, passionately, looking at the ceiling as if to make sure that God heard her accusation, and as if she hoped to irritate Him into hearing future prayers.
"Nor of mine, either, until I learned how to pray."
"Who discovered the new way? That Eddy woman?"
"How, I should like to know? Why was all this given to her to know and not to some man?"
"By the way," said Rosemary, as if changing the subject, "I hear that you speak both Japanese and Russian and that you did some important interpreting at a banquet on board the Kaiser’s yacht at Cowes, last spring. Did you?"
"However did you manage to master two such awfully difficult languages?"
"How strange that my brother was not called upon to do that interpreting," said Rosemary, in a musing tone. "He was at that banquet, and he is a man."
Carolina opened her lips to make an incautious reply, but caught herself just in time. A gleam in Rosemary’s eyes warned her.
"I see," she said, reddening. "But I must say you baited the hook skilfully."
"I had to, in order to catch you," said Rosemary.