le parts. Doubtless the
little communities prayed for each other. One may imagine, not
profanely, their petitions rising on either side of the heedless,
multitudinous, idolatrous city, and meeting at some point in the purer
air above the yellow dust-haze. I am not aware that they held any other
mutual duty or privilege, but this bond was known and enabled people
whose conscience pricked them in that direction to give little garden
teas to which they invited Clarke Brothers and Baker Sisters, secure in
doing a benevolent thing and at the same time embarrassing nobody,
except, possibly, the Archdeacon, who was officially exposed to being
asked as well and had no right to complain. The affiliation was thus a
social convenience, since it is unlikely that without it anybody would
have hit upon so ingenious a way of killing, as it were, a Baker Sister
and a Clarke Brother with one stone. It is not surprising that this
degree of intelligence should fail to see the profound official
difference between Baker Sisters and Baker Novices. As the Sister
Superior said, it did not seem to occur to people that there could be,
in connection with a religious body, such words as discipline and
subordination, which were certainly made ridiculous for the time being,
where she and Sister Ann Frances were asked to eat ices on the same
terms with Miss Hilda Howe. It must have been more than ever painful to
these ladies, regarded from the official point of view, when it became
plain, as it usually did, that the interest of the afternoon centred in
Miss Howe, whether or not the Archdeacon happened to be present. Their
displeasure was so clear, after the first occasion, that Hilda felt
obliged, when the next one came, to fall back on her original talent,
and ate her ice abashed and silent, speaking only when she was spoken
to, and then in short words and long hesitations. Thereupon the Sisters
were of opinion that, after all, poor Miss Howe could not help her
unenviable note--she was perhaps more to be pitied on account of it than
anything else. It came to this, that Sister Ann Frances even had an
exhibitor's pride in her, and Hilda knew the sensations of a barbarian
female captive in the bonds of the Christians. But she could not afford
to risk being cut off from those little garden teas. All told, they were
few; ladies disturbed by ideas of social duties toward missionaries
being so uncommon.

She told Stephen so, frankly, one afternoon when he