Women of the Country

ch should have paid for it, to repeat exactly the same offence the following week. Her reputation for queerness let her be considered fair game, and so convinced is the ordinary person that queerness is of necessity contemptible, that when she did anything which was unusual, its reason was never examined, nor did the possibility that it might be better done in that way occur to anybody. It was merely a new evidence of her oddity.

But it was especially in those points in which she felt herself moved by her religious convictions that she was most suspected. For in spite and over all her eccentricities of belief, she was genuinely religious, having the two great religious virtues, charity in judgment and sorrow for the failures of others. But again she was "different," as it is evident in this world that the failures of other people are entirely their own fault, and to be gentle in judgment is more than other people will be to you, and therefore unnecessary. So that, without being in intention a reformer,