I gave it up with a sigh; and there was one good instinct lost.
When I was about eleven, I fell foul of some good books.

If it had not been for them, I truly do not see how I could have known that I was not to lie or steal, and that God was to be worshipped.

Certainly, I had had hands slapped many times for taking things I had been forbidden to touch, and had had many a battle in consequence of "telling stories," with the servants of the house, but I had always recognized the personal spite of the punishments, and they had not carried with them any moral lesson.
I had sometimes gone to church; but the sermons in large city churches are not generally elementary, and I did not understand those that I heard at all.

Occasionally I went with the nurse to Vespers, and that I thought delightful.

I was enraptured with the pictures, the music, the rich clothes of the priests; if it had not been for the bad odor of the neighboring worshippers, I think I might have rushed into the bosom of the Church of Rome.