talking about? They seemed so
familiar with God. They knew just when He was pleased and especially
when He was displeased.

She had come down out of her hills where everything was so open, where
there were no mysteries, where everything from the bark on the trees
to the snow clouds on Marcy, fifty miles away, was as clear as a
printed book. Everything up there told its plain lesson. She could
read the storm signs and the squirrel tracks. Nothing had been hidden.
Nothing in nature or life up there had ever shut itself away from
her.

Here were worlds inside of worlds, every one of them closing its door
in the face of her sharp, hungry mind.

And there was that other world, enveloping all the other lesser worlds
about her--the world of the Catholic Church.

Three weeks ago those two words had meant to her a little green
building in French Village where the "Canucks" went to church.

Now her day began and ended with it. It was on all sides of her. The
pictures and the images on every wall, the signs on every classroom
door. The books she read, the talk she heard was all filled with it.
It came and went through every door of life.

All the inherited prejudices of her line of New England fathers were
alive and stirring in her against this religion that demanded so much.
The untrammelled spirit that the hills had given her fought against
it. It was so absolute. It was so sure of everything. She wanted to
argue with it, to quarrel with it. She was sure that it must be wrong
sometimes.

But just when she was sure that she had found something false,
something that she knew was not right in the things they taught her,
she was always told that she had not understood. Some one was always
ready to tell her, in an easy, patient, amused way, that she had
gotten the thing wrong. How could they always be so sure? And what was
wrong with her that she could not understand? She could learn
everything else faster and more easily than the other girls could.

Suddenly her fingers slipped off the keys and her hands fell
nervelessly to her sides. Her eyes were blinded with great, burning
tears. A wave of intolerable longing and loneliness swept over her.

The wonderful, enchanting world that she had come out of her hills to
conquer was cut down to the four little grey walls that enclosed her.
Everything was shut away from her. She did not understand these
strange women about her. Would never understand them.

Why? Why had she ever