Claire's lifted hand stayed his words. "See," she said, "how you bear testimony to what I have declared. If I 'seem made' for the cloister, what can that mean save that my place is there?"
"Then is there no place for pure and good and lovely people in the world?" asked Earle, conscious that his tongue had indeed betrayed him.
"Oh, yes!" she answered; "there are not only places, but there are also many duties for such people; and numbers of them are to be met on all sides. But there are also some souls whom God calls to serve Him in the silence and retirement of the cloister, who pine like homesick exiles in the world. Believe me I am one of those souls. I shrank from leaving the convent where I had been educated, to go out into the world; but I knew what everyone would say: that I was following a fancy—an untried fancy—if I stayed. So I went; and, as if to test me, everything that I desired has been given me, and given without the delays and disappointments that others have had to endure. The world has shown me only its fairest side, yet the call to something better and higher has daily grown stronger within me, until I have no longer any doubt but that it is God's will that I shall go."
Earle threw himself into a chair, and sat for a minute silent, like one stunned. He felt as if he had heard a death-warrant read—as if he was not only to be robbed individually, but the world was to be robbed of this lovely creature with her brilliant gift.
"What am I to say to you?" he cried at length, in a half-stifled voice. "This seems to me too horrible for belief. It is like suicide—the suicide of the faculties, the genius that God has given you,—of all the capabilities of your nature to enjoy,—of all the beauty, the happiness of life—"
He paused, for Claire was regarding him with a look of amazement and reproach. "You call yourself a Catholic," she said, "and yet you can speak in this way of a religious vocation!"
"I do not speak of religious vocations in general," he answered. "I only speak of yours. There are plenty of people who have nothing special to do in the world. Let them go to the cloister. But for you—you with your wonderful talent, your bright future—it is too terrible an idea to be entertained."
"Do you know," she said gravely, "that you not only shock, you disappoint me greatly? How can you be a Catholic and entertain such sentiments?—how can you think that only the useless, the worn-out, the disappointed people of this world are for God? I have been told that Protestants think such things as that, but they are surely strange for a Catholic to believe."
"I do not believe them," he said; "I am sure you know that. But when one is awfully shocked, one does not measure one's words. You do not realize how close this comes to me—how terrible the disappointment—"
She cut him short ruthlessly. "I realize," she said, with a sweet smile, "that you are very kind to have such a good opinion of me—to believe that the world will really sustain any loss when such an insignificant person as I leave it for the cloister."