of the family and was what she called a deaconess. It's a sort of half
and half thing, not like a Sister of Mercy exactly...."

"A Cousin of Mercy, shall we say?" suggested the Parson. "I think I once
met the lady and I know what you mean. She had rows of little books,
hadn't she?"

"Yes, and thought it was the sin against the Holy Ghost if she missed
saying what she called her Hours. I'm sorry to be profane, but she did
annoy me so though I was only a youngster. And now mother seems to be
getting very like it. I wouldn't mind a bit if it made her happy, but it
doesn't, not a bit of it."

"Nothing would make your mother happy--she wouldn't think it right; but
she's only like a lot of women in that. The evils of Puritanism seem to
have taken a deeper root in women than in men, and in some it has kept
on cropping up generation after generation. Your mother is a born
Puritan, which is why I wish her to stay a Wesleyan. There is no more
arduous combination than the Puritan by instinct labouring under
acquired Catholicism. I am a bad missionary, I suppose, but I have seen
too much of these women."

"Women make such a fuss about nothing!" complained Ishmael.

"What has always seemed to me the mistake about the religious life as it
is lived to-day," said Boase, "is the overweening importance given to
trifles. The distortion of the sweeping-a-room-to-the-glory-of-God
theory. If the mind is properly attuned to the spiritual sphere temporal
things should lose significance, not gain them. I don't mean that we
must leave off seeing to them--that would result in our all lying down,