There, the little pew-opener had left her, having to show the
early-comers to their seats; and Joan had found an out-of-the-way pew
from where she could command a view of the whole church. They were
chiefly poor folk, the congregation; with here and there a sprinkling of
faded gentility. They seemed in keeping with the place. The twilight
faded and a snuffy old man shuffled round and lit the gas.

It was all so sweet and restful. Religion had never appealed to her
before. The business-like service in the bare cold chapel where she had
sat swinging her feet and yawning as a child had only repelled her. She
could recall her father, aloof and awe-inspiring in his Sunday black,
passing round the bag. Her mother, always veiled, sitting beside her, a
thin, tall woman with passionate eyes and ever restless hands; the women
mostly overdressed, and the sleek, prosperous men trying to look meek. At
school and at Girton, chapel, which she had attended no oftener than she
was obliged, had had about it the same atmosphere of chill compulsion.
But here was poetry. She wondered if, after all, religion might not have
its place in the world--in company with the other arts. It would be a
pity for it to die out. There seemed nothing to take its place. All
these lovely cathedrals, these dear little old churches, that for
centuries had been the focus of men's thoughts and aspirations. The
harbour lights, illumining the troubled waters of their lives. What
could be done with them? They could hardly be maintained out of the
public funds as mere mementoes of the past. Besides, there were too many
of them. The tax-payer would naturally grumble. As Town Halls, Assembly
Rooms? The idea was unthinkable. It would be like a performance of
Barnum's Circus in the Coliseum at Rome. Yes, they would disappear.
Though not, she was glad to think, in her time. In towns, the space
would be required for other buildings. Here and there some gradually
decaying specimen would be allowed to survive, taking its place with the
feudal castles and walled cities of the Continent: the joy of the
American tourist, the text-book of the antiquary. A pity! Yes, but then
from the aesthetic point of view it was a pity that the groves of ancient
Greece had ever been cut down and replanted with currant bushes, their
altars scattered; that the stones of the temples of Isis should have come
to be the shelter of the fisher of the Nile; and the corn wave in