Argemone really could not tell at the moment. The answer upset her scheme entirely.
'Might not that very admiration of nature have been an act of worship?' continued our hero. 'How can we better glorify the worker, than by delighting in his work?'
'Ah!' sighed the lady, 'why trust to these self-willed methods, and neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts?'
'Every feeling, Miss Lavington?'
Argemone hesitated. She had made the good old stock assertion, as in duty bound; but she could not help recollecting that there were several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table, which seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book.
'My temple as yet,' said Lancelot, is only the heaven and the earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the sense to be silent, and 'hear my mother sing;' my priests and preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud. Am I not well enough furnished? Do you want to reduce my circular infinite chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one? My sphere-harmonies to the Gregorian tones in four parts? My world-wide priesthood, with their endless variety of costume, to one not over-educated gentleman in a white sheet? And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies, and the blue-bells ringing God's praises, as they do in The Story without an End, for the gross reality of naughty charity children,
