"He wasn't a Pisspocalian, like us?" Emmie asked.
"No; Roman Catholic. We had all gone different ways by that time, but he would say, 'Ah! wait till you're as old as I: you'll all come back into the bosom of Mother Church.'" She would smile at this. "He was not a thinker--he had lived all his best years in the active world of work and pleasure, and when he saw his end in sight, he looked about him for a priest." She would smile again--less tenderly, more ironically. "This was priests' business; best leave it in their hands."
It was interesting to the children to observe that not even for the benefit of the young was family history falsified.
"Oh, he was consistent enough. Even before he embraced Roman Catholicism, he never spoke of religion except with the greatest reverence." She would glance sharply at the children's father, if he were present when she reached this point in that or any similar narrative, seeming for the moment to lose sight of the younger generation in her desire to point the moral for the benefit of her son. "I never heard of a Calvert who questioned revealed religion; and as for the Ganos, any one who has a mind to look, may read in the family record that they were all eminent for piety in their day and generation."
"Does that little record go further back than 1760?" her son once asked, meditatively.
"No: but that's quite far enough to show what's expected."
During this illness in particular, there were times when Val was drawn unaccountably to the strange old woman. If the child had had more encouragement, she could have loved her well and openly, renouncing for her sake domestic heresy and schism. The secret passion for loving and being loved had grown in the girl with every year. It was not only the strongest current that swept through her being--that is true of many--but even in this young and sheltered life it rose betimes to freshet and to flood, hungry, devouring, unappeased. The girl led three lives--the gay, triumphant surface one at school, the checkered existence at home, and that deep heart life apart in the sunlit valley of imagination, whither, when the wind of destiny blew bleak on the uplands of domestic life, she would retreat with all the honors of war--rally and "captain her army of shining and generous dreams."