I cannot chronologize the events in our life at Lincoln, which only lasted for three and a half years, and I do not quite know when the Cathedral services began to wear a perfectly new complexion for me. The reason of this was that I was violently attracted by a choir-boy, or rather a chorister, one of four, who instead of wearing a surplice like the common choir-boy, wore a long dark blue coat down to the knees faced with white. A similar experience, I fancy, is almost universal: the first romantic affection a girl is conscious of is nearly always towards a girl, and in the same way, a small boy, when first his physical nature begins to grope, still quite blindly and innocently, in the misty country of emotion, is pretty certain to take as his idol for secret romantic worship, one of his own sex. It was so at any rate with me, and instead of the Cathedral services being of incomparable tedium, they became exciting and exalting. He, the nameless he, came in procession at the end of the choir-boys just before the lay-clerks, and besides having this soul-stirring effect on me, he woke in me, by means of his singing, my first love of music. He sat at the end of the choir nearest our seat, and luckily on the other side, so that I could see him without the intervention of dull people’s heads. I could hear his voice, sexless and unemotional, above the rest of the trebles, but with what emotion did that voice inspire me! He used to sing solos as well, and I am sure that the sneaking love that I have still for Mendelssohn, was due to the fact that (unaccompanied) he sang “The night is departing, depa-a-art (A in alt) ing.” I would have welcomed the interminable Litany becoming literally interminable, so long as he continued singing, “We beseech thee to hear us, Good Lord,” with his chin a little stuck out, and his eyes roving about the pews. Sometimes I thought he saw me and noticed me, and then my imagination took wings to itself, and I saw myself meeting him somewhere alone, him in his chorister’s cope. What we should have to say to each other, I had not the smallest idea, but we should be together, and there lay completion. It was due to his unconscious influence that I began to sing loudly in the chapel at the Chancery, and never shall I forget my father once saying to me, “Perhaps some day you will sing an anthem in the Cathedral.” That supplied a fresh imaginative chapter to my secret book; I should be a chorister too, and sit next the idol, and we would sing together. I was not egoistic in this vision: I had no thought of ravishing the world by the beauty of my voice: it merely became a sunlit possibility (after all my father had said as much) that I should sing in the Cathedral. But I knew, though he did not, that I should be singing with the chorister. Thanks to my idol, Sunday became, as long as this passion lasted, a day in which joy watered the arid sands of Bishop Heber’s Journal, and made it, literally, “break forth into singing.” That emotion, the fulfilment of which was brought into the realms of possibility by my father’s remark, touched such religion as I had with ecstasy, and I added to my prayers the following petition, which I said night and morning.