"Queer notion, this, a lot of women shutting themselves up," remarked the younger of the two. "In England, now, they'd all go in for being old maids, drinking tea and coddling cats, you know."
"I wonder which are the happier, your countrywomen or these Sisters, who, in renouncing the world devote their lives to serving it. See, over yonder" and I nodded to a scene beneath the wide avenue of the limes. Two tall Augustines were supporting a crippled old man; they were showing him some fresh garden-beds. Beyond was a gayer group. Some of the lay sisters were tugging at a huge basket of clothes, fresh from the laundry. Running across the grass, with flying draperies, two nuns, laughing as they ran, each striving to outfoot the other, were hastening to their rescue.
"They keep their bloom, running about like that; only healthy nuns I ever saw."
"That's because they have something better than cats to coddle."
"Ah, ha! that's not bad. It's a slow suicide, all the same. But here we are, at the top; it's a fine outlook, is it not?"
The young man panted as he reached the top of the Maze, one of the chief glories of the old Abbaye grounds. He had a fair and sensitive face; a weak product on the whole, he seemed, compared with the nobly-built, vigorous-bodied nuns crowding the choir-stalls yonder. Instead of that long, slow suicide, surely these women should be doing their greater work of reproducing a race. Even an open-air cell seems to me out of place in our century. It will be entirely out of fashion in time, doubtless, as the mediaeval cell has gone along with the old castle life, whose princely mode of doing things made a nunnery the only respectable hiding-place for the undowered daughters.
As we crept down into Caen, it was to find it thick with the dust of twilight. The streets were dense with other things besides the thickened light. The Caen world was crowding homeward; all the boulevards and side streets were alive with a moving throng of dusty, noisy, weary holidaymakers. The town was abroad in the streets to hear the news of the horses, and to learn the history of the betting.
Although we had gone to church instead of doing the races, many of those who had peopled the gay race-track came back to us. The table d'hôte, at our inn that night, was as noisy as a Parisian cafe. It was scarcely as discreet, I should say. On our way to our attic that night, the little corridors made us a really amazing number of confidences.
It was strange, but all the shoes appeared to have come in pairs of twos. Never was there such a collection of boots in couples. Strange it was, also, to see how many little secrets these rows of candid shoe-leather disclosed. Here a pert, coquettish pair of ties were having as little in common as possible with the stout, somewhat clumsy walking-boots next them. In the two just beyond, at the next door, how the delicate, slender buttoned kids leaned over, floppingly, to rest on the coarse, yet strong, hobnailed clumpers!
Shabbier and shabbier grew the shoes, as we climbed upward. With each pair of stairs we seemed to have left a rung in the ladder of fortune behind. But even the very poorest in pocket had brought his little extravagance with him to the races.