The Dawn of a to-Morrow by Frances Hodgson Burnett

He was a young man with an eager soul, and his work in Apple Blossom Court and places like it had torn him many ways. Religious conventions established through centuries of custom had not prepared him for life among the submerged. He had struggled and been appalled, he had wrestled in prayer and felt himself unanswered, and in repentance of the feeling had scourged himself with thorns. Miss Montaubyn, returning from the hospital, had filled him at first with horror and protest.

"But who knows -- who knows? " he said to Dart, as they stood and talked together afterward, "Faith as a little child. That is literally hers. And I was shocked by it -- and tried to destroy it, until I suddenly saw what I was doing. I was -- in my cloddish egotism -- trying to show her that she was irreverent BECAUSE she could believe what in my soul I do not, though I dare not admit so much even to myself. She took from some strange passing visitor to her tortured bedside what was to her a revelation. She heard it first as a child hears a story of magic. When she came out of the hospital, she told it as if it was one. I -- I -- " he bit his lips and moistened them, "argued with her and reproached her. Christ the Merciful, forgive me! She sat in her squalid little room with her magic -- sometimes in the dark -- sometimes without fire, and she clung to it, and loved it and asked it to help her, as a child asks its father for bread.