“No.”
“Then do you mean to put the whole thing out of your mind till you’re much older—say about twenty-five—and just submit, till then?”
Even as she spoke, Rosamund felt convinced that such a course had not presented itself to Frances.
“No,” said Frances with the inflexible note in her childish voice that Porthlew was learning to dread. “It wouldn’t be right to do that. Father Anselm is a very wise priest and very holy, and he says I ought to be brave and go now. If I am unfaithful to my vocation, it may be taken away from me.”
Rosamund, quite unconscious of humour, reflected on the extreme convenience of such a solution. She did not believe that any Divine call had come to her sister, but she felt convinced that Frances would know no rest until she had tested by experience the reality of her religious vocation.
“You’d better go, I think,” she said abruptly.
“Go now?” Frances whitened. “Then I should have to run away.”
“Oh no, Francie! If you say, definitely, that you’re going to the convent no one can stop you. They can’t lock you up or use brute force.”
The moral courage involved in such a course seemed unattainable to Frances. The psychological moment, however, for which we all, consciously or unconsciously, wait when on the brink of a vital decision, came at last.
There came an instant, unexpectedly even to herself, when Frances looked up from a letter received by the afternoon post, and said suddenly: