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8 dong. Pom, pom, pom. They strike quite regularly and punctually all the week, and never fail to do their duty. How Aunt Cathie can reconcile it with her conscience to say the General Confession I don't know. She never does what she ought not, or doesn't what she ought. And it does make people so dull to have no failings! It does, doesn't it? And everyone at Brixham is so old: I wonder they don't send for them all to the British Museum, and put them in the new wing. It would hold them nicely."

Maud's disapproval was rapidly melting. It was shocking, of course, to speak of your aunts like this, but somehow Lucia's frankness disarmed censure. Maud realized that had she been in Lucia's place she would almost certainly have thought these things, though her thoughts would not have been cast quite in Lucia's humorous mould, and her inimitable friend only said what she herself would have been unable to find words for. But she made one faint attempt to indicate a more proper attitude.

"Oh, Lucia, but they are so kind to you," she said. "You have often told me so."

"Yes, the darlings, but theirs is the true kindness, you know, which seeks to improve one. Of course it is very right that one should be improved, but it is nicer, you know, to be allowed to enjoy yourself. Besides—this is one of the things I have just begun to see—I am not really capable of improvement. I'm not wound up by cathedral service; what winds me up is theatres and operas and dances, and all the movement of life and its gaieties. They make me most myself, just as Aunt Cathie is most herself after early service."

Maud made a decided movement at this.

"Oh, don't, Lucia," she said. "We can all make the best of ourselves or the worst of ourselves. We can all laugh at what we know to be sacred"

Lucia interrupted.

"Oh, my dear, that is exactly where you are wrong," she said. "You can't, for instance; you couldn't do it, because you are good. Well, I'm not good. I'm a beast. But whether we are good or beasts, we all want to enjoy ourselves; we want to be happy. And we all make plans to be happy. Aunt Cathie and Aunt Elizabeth both make heaps of plans. They go to all the church congresses and hospitals, and homes for forcing people to be reclaimed, which I think is such a liberty to take with anyone.