doms," cried
Lady Kew, looking fiercely over her spectacles. And Julia was instructed
to write that night to her sister, and desire that Ethel should be sent
to see her grandmother:--Ethel, who rebelled against her grandmother,
and always fought on her Aunt Julia's side, when the weaker was
oppressed by the older and stronger lady.

CHAPTER XI. At Mrs. Ridley's

Saint Peter of Alcantara, as I have read in a life of St. Theresa,
informed that devout lady that he had passed forty years of his life
sleeping only an hour and a half each day; his cell was but four feet
and a half long, so that he never lay down: his pillow was a wooden log
in the stone wall: he ate but once in three days: he was for three years
in a convent of his order without knowing any one of his brethren except
by the sound of their voices, for he never during this period took his
eyes off the ground: he always walked barefoot, and was but skin and
bone when he died. The eating only once in three days, so he told his
sister Saint, was by no means impossible, if you began the regimen in
your youth. To conquer sleep was the hardest of all austerities which
he practised:--I fancy the pious individual so employed, day after day,
night after night, on his knees, or standing up in devout meditation
in the cupboard--his dwelling-place; bareheaded and barefooted, walking
over rocks, briars, mud, sharp stones (picking out the very worst
places, let us trust, with his downcast eyes), under the bitter snow,
or the drifting rain, or the scorching sunshine--I fancy Saint Peter of
Alcantara, and contrast him with such a personage as the Incumbent of
Lady Whittlesea's Chapel, Mayfair.

His hermitage is situated in Walpole Street, let us say, on the second
floor of a quiet mansion, let out to hermits by a nobleman's butler,
whose wife takes care of the lodgings. His cells consist of a refectory,
a dormitory, and an adjacent oratory where he keeps his shower-bath and
boots--the pretty boots trimly stretched on boot-trees and blacked to
a nicety (not varnished) by the boy who waits on him. The barefooted
business may suit superstitious ages and gentlemen of Alcantara, but
does not become Mayfair and the nineteenth century. If St. Pedro walked
the earth now with his eyes to the ground he would know fashionable
divines by the way in which they were shod. Charles Honeyman's is a
sweet foot. I have no doubt as delicate and plump and rosy as the white
hand with its