of this nameless need. It was a need that no plain and
ugly little place of worship would satisfy. It was a need that demanded
choir and organ. She went to Saint Paul's haphazard when her mood and
opportunity chanced together and there in the afternoons she found a
wonder of great music and chanting voices, and she would kneel looking
up into those divine shadows and perfect archings and feel for a time
assuaged, wonderfully assuaged. Sometimes, there, she seemed to be upon
the very verge of grasping that hidden reality which makes all things
plain. Sometimes it seemed to her that this very indulgence was the
hidden reality.

She could never be sure in her mind whether these secret worshippings
helped or hampered her in her daily living. They helped her to a certain
disregard of annoyances and indignities and so far they were good, but
they also helped towards a more general indifference. She might have
told these last experiences to Mr. Brumley if she had not felt them to
be indescribable. They could not be half told. They had to be told
completely or they were altogether untellable. So she had them hid, and
at once accepted and distrusted the consolation they brought her, and
went on with the duties and philanthropies that she had chosen as her
task in the world.

Sec.2

One day in Lent--it was nearly three years after the opening of the
first hostel--she went to Saint Paul's.

She was in a mood of great discouragement; the struggle between Mrs.
Pembrose and the Bloomsbury girls had suddenly reopened in an acute form
and Sir Isaac, who was sickening again after a period of better health,
had become strangely restless and irritable and hostile to her. He had
thwarted her unusually and taken the side of the matrons in a conflict
in which Susan Burnet's sister Alice was now distinguished as the chief
of the malcontents. The new trouble seemed to Lady Harman to be
traceable in one direction to that ardent Unionist, Miss Babs Wheeler,
under the spell of whose round-faced, blue-eyed, distraught personality
Alice had altogether fallen. Miss Babs Wheeler was fighting for the
Union; she herself lived at Highbury with her mother, and Alice was her
chosen instrument in the hostels. The Union had always been a little
against the lady-like instincts of many of the waitresses; they felt
strikes were vulgar and impaired their social standing, and this feeling
had been greatly strengthened by irruptions of large contingents of