"“I was arguing with Father Sebastian the other day,” she said thoughtfully. “I quoted the thing about giving all you have to the poor. He said that was all very well but you had to come to terms with the Scriptures and realize there had to be teachers and leaders for the people’s own good. It seemed an awful get-out to me, and I couldn’t help saying so. I told him if the Church would sell half her altar plate she could buy shoes for everybody in the country, and a lot else besides; and that if the Pope would make a start in Rome I’d see about getting rid of a few job lots of furniture down in Corfe. I’m afraid he didn’t take very kindly to it. I know it was wrong of me but he annoys me sometimes; he’s so pious, and it seems to mean so very little. He’d walk miles in the snow to pray for a sick child, he’s a very good man; but if there was more money about to start with, maybe the child wouldn’t have been taken ill. It all seems so unnecessary...."

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“A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth.”

“The years had a way of piling themselves one atop the next, unnoticed and uncounted; that was how young men turned into old ones.”

“She curled her lip. She had discovered cynicism.”

“She stopped dead; and the look in her eyes showed plainly she’d just received the import of a crude lesson in economics.”

““Confession,” he said, “must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.”

“The waves were indifferent, and the wind; and the rocks neither knew nor cared who owned them, Christ’s Vicar or an English King.”

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