In a third, the artist seemed to have had a higher perception, and had striven hard to shadow out the Virgin's joy at bringing the Saviour into the world, and her awe and love, inextricably mingled, of the little form which she pressed against her bosom.

So far was good.

But still, Hilda looked for something more; a face of celestial beauty, but human as well as heavenly, and with the shadow of past grief upon it; bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and motherly; and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender, as the highest and deepest attribute of her divinity.
"Ah," thought Hilda to herself, "why should not there be a woman to listen to the prayers of women?
A mother in heaven for all motherless girls like me?
In all God's thought and care for us, can he have withheld this boon, which our weakness so much needs ?" Oftener than to the other churches, she wandered into St.Peter's.
Within its vast limits, she thought, and beneath the sweep of its great dome, there should be space for all forms of Christian truth; room both for the faithful and the heretic to kneel; due help for every creature's spiritual want.
Hilda had not always been adequately impressed by the grandeur of this mighty cathedral.

When she first lifted the heavy leathern curtain, at one of the doors, a shadowy edifice in her imagination had been dazzled out of sight by the reality.

Her preconception of St.Peter's was a structure of no definite outline, misty in its architecture, dim and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable perspective, and overarched by a dome like the cloudy firmament.