Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/248

 face and the Holy Father behind his back; he's going to be an Anglican monk, you know,—we've settled down to do religion, mainly, and get ready for college, incidentally. Mother is really 'doing' it; Dolly and I—well, we 'assist,' in the French sense. We study a little, and go to church a lot, and swim in the afternoon, and play mah jongg after dinner; and the Holy Father reads prayers in the morning on week days and twice on Sundays; and Mother is reading Newman's Idea of a University aloud, and she goes to early communion, and fasts on saints' days, and is a member of the altar guild—and she is taking in laundry."

"Taking in what?" I ejaculated.

"Taking in laundry. She has consecrated her hands to the Church. She washes the rector's vestments and things. You know she always had a kind of passion for keeping things clean—souls and bodies and so on. So this job just hits her fancy now, and 'fills her life,' you know. When we started for Los Angeles this morning, she was ironing the vestments, and, believe me, when I saw her bending over the ironing-board, she looked so perfectly blissful that I—I pitied her. It seems kind of daffy to me."