Aunt Anne walked first and took what was obviously her own regular seat near the front.Maggie sat between her two aunts.She could not feel for the moment anything but a startled surprise at the ugliness of the building.She had entered at different times the Glebeshire chapels, but their primitive position and need had given them the spirit of honest sincerity.Here she had expected she did not know what.Always from those very early days when she had first heard about her aunts she had had visions of a strange illuminated place into which God, "riding on a chariot clothed in flames," would one day come.Even after she had grown up she had still fancied that the centre of her aunts' strange, fantastic religion must be a strange, fantastic place.And yet now, as she looked around her, she was not, to her own surprise, disappointed.She was even satisfied; the "wonder" was not in the building.Well, then, it must be in something "inside," something that she had yet to discover.The chapel had the thrilling quality of a little plain deal box that carries a jewel.
She examined then the people around her.Women were in a great majority, a man scattered forlornly amongst them once and again.She discovered at once the alert eyes of young Mr.Warlock.He was seated in the side aisle with a thin, severe-looking woman beside him.He stared straight in front of him, wriggling sometimes his broad back as though he were a dog tied by a chain.Some one else very quickly claimed Maggie's attention; this was a girl who, in the seat behind Mr.Warlock, was as noticeable in that congregation as a bird-of-paradise amongst a colony of crows.She was wearing a dress of light blue silk and a large hat of blue with a grey bird in the front of it.