Page:The Eleventh Virgin.pdf/48

formal Sunday meal, and rather a disagreeable pose on the part of June. Of course it wasn’t a pose. June would admit it. But didn’t everyone have poses, and why was one more objectionable than another?

There was another aspect of her religion which June caught a glimpse of once after long and consecutive thought on the subject. She had been reading of early Christian saints and took note of the fact that most of them indulged in trances. Not that she put it that way. It was hours of meditation, fasting, prayer and vigil, on which emphasis was laid, not only in the lives of the saints, but in the exhortations of á Kempis, and Wesley. And it occurred to June that some English poet had tried to induce the same ecstasy, according to some essay she had read, by sitting on a hilltop and trying either to think of nothing or to concentrate on a bluebell (she could not remember which). But she did remember that the poet quoted Indian philosophers as inspiration to his endeavor. Further reading discovered to her sages sitting on the banks of streams, grass growing from their toes, baked and wedged and stiffened into a perpetual pose, by the sun, the wind and the rain.

(With no early knowledge of Indian philosophers, had not June and Adele tried to outdo each other in seeing who could pray the longest, and had not stubbornness and cramp given way to a drowsy