Perhaps she could become a Catholic. Why not? If it moved you like this just to be in contact with the Church—what must it bring you to be intimately of it? She remembered that in a book Sister Ste. Lucie had given her, stories were told of women who lost consciousness from sheer emotion, when they felt the consecrated wafer of Communion on their tongues; others who were caught up among the saints for hours, hearing heavenly music and when they came to themselves, the room was all scented richly with invisible roses....
Also, without a word spoken she thought she had understood that the Marquise de Charmières and all that old aristocratic set would not be so stand-offish if she were converted.
But as this last idea slid into her mind from behind something else, there came with it as frighteningly as if she had seen the walls of her stone corridor closing in on her, a doubt that cast a stale sallow reflection on all her thoughts;—suppose she were really taken up by the Marquise and all the old aristocratic set, would things be any different then? Mightn't that, too, be just something else she had gone out after and brought home and hung on the wall, only to find that it changed nothing? She turned away from this idea, cold and frightened at all it implied ... that life was not deep at all, anywhere, but a shallow mud-hole, and that she had sunk far enough down to touch the bottom.
She heard now the uneven clattering jangle of the bell, heard Isabelle come out of the bed-room and go down the tile-paved corridor. Her sandals dragged at the heel as they always did in the morning before she put on her street shoes. That slatternly flap and drag of Isabelle's sandals made her mistress sick. She had spoken about them a thousand times. She had come to have a nervous hatred of the sound, had actually flown into rages over it, stamping and shrieking at Isabelle as she despised French housekeepers for doing. But how much impression had she made? For one morning, perhaps two, Isabelle laced up her early morning foot-gear, and after that she always forgot, slid back, flop, scuff, flop. That was the sort of sandals all the chambermaids in Bayonne wore for the first cleaning of the morning; that was the kind they always had worn; the American mistress might as well make up her mind to the fact that that was the kind they always would wear. There was about this trivial matter of the sandals, the same nightmare quality of passive, inert resistance to the idea of any change, which sagged smotheringly down on Flora Allen everywhere she turned in her French life. They called it stability. She and her friends in Belton had called it a "background of tradition."
And yet she knew herself now incapable of going back to live in Belton where she would not be able always to depend on an Isabelle, where at times she would have to sweep her own rooms, and scour her own greasy pots herself. It made her sick to think of living that way again—nobody to bring her breakfast in the morning! To get up in a cold house with all the responsibility for everything on her shoulders. She felt weak at the thought of it.
Isabelle scuffed in, the mail in one rough, strong, red hand, and flapped back to her cleaning. This time her mistress made no comment on her laceless sandals.
What might there be in the mail? Nothing interesting, that she knew beforehand. She turned the letters over, recognizing from their very aspect the flatness of their contents. A letter from America? Oh, yes, only from Horace's old Cousin Hetty, for Marise. How she did keep up that correspondence! Did she suppose for a minute that any child could go on remembering some one she hadn't seen for four years, especially a child like Marise, so self-centered and absorbed in her own life, caring really about nothing but her music.
A bill for Marise's school for the last quarter—to be put with Horace's mail; a circular from that something-or-other society Mlle. Hasparren was always fussing over, trying to raise money to keep some quartet running in Bayonne; a bill from the dressmaker; another circular—oh, as bad as Mlle. Hasparren's, that association with the long name, that took care of foundling babies—they were always wanting money too! A notice from the school, another bill? No, the announcement of the music-contest that afternoon. Heavens! Never again for her! Once was enough, to sit silently all a long afternoon on a teetering folding chair in the midst of stodgy, dowdy mothers, whose boring eyes saw right through the fabric of your dress to the safety-pin with which you had replaced a missing petticoat button, and who had no more interest in the music banged out by the schoolgirls than you had, except to wish ill to every child not their own.
There was one letter, addressed to her in the pointed, fine convent handwriting of Sœur Ste. Lucie. She opened this with more interest. Ah, Father Elie was coming back. And wished to see her to-morrow afternoon. She felt a little stir of her pulse, the first in so long. What dress would she wear to the convent? Her black voile—and the little close-fitting hat?