In the Queen’s prayer book, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all — the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco — to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God. Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s. Orlando, it seemed, had a faith of her own. With all the religious ardour in the world, she now reflected upon her sins and the imperfections that had crept into her spiritual state. The letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the Poet’s Eden. Do what she would there were still two many of these sinful reptiles in the first stanzas of “The Oak Tree.” But ‘S’ was nothing, in her opinion, compared with the terminating ‘ing.’ The present participle is the Devil himself, she thought (now that we are in the place for believing in Devils). To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet, she concluded, for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet’s then in the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine. Thus it is obvious that she was back in the confines of her own religion which time had only strengthened in her absence, and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of belief.

“I am growing up,” she thought, taking her taper at last. “I am losing some illusions,” she said, shutting Queen Mary’s book, “perhaps to acquire others,” and she descended among the tombs where the bones of her ancestors lay.