Rising from her little stool on the first stroke of the bell which proclaimed renewed silence, she was generally conscious of distinct exhilaration, resulting from the interval of talk and laughter. In virtue of her English nationality, Frances was often allowed to make her half-hour’s spiritual reading out of doors. This she did after the midday recreation, gravely kilting her serge habit above the stiff woollen underskirt, and pacing the round of the garden with steady, measured footsteps, her head bent over some devotional volume bound in stout brown paper with a little gummed blue label on the back.
The afternoon’s routine of instructions, choir-practices, and the like was unbroken till supper at seven o’clock. The institution of afternoon tea held no place in the convent curriculum, and Frances, who had been told that this might at first present itself to her in the light of a deprivation, found herself, on the contrary, thankful that no additional meal should intervene between the substantial dinner and supper.
The amount of coarse but nourishing food which she found herself expected to assimilate was a continual source of wonder and at first of distress, to the novice. Where were the ascetic fasts and austerities of the religious life, if one was required to make two such meals every day? Even on the regular days of fasting and abstinence decreed by the Church, Frances found that she was only allowed to indulge in a modified form of abstention.
Even after six months’ novitiate, she still looked doubtfully at the brown platter heaped with butter beans, the hunk of bread, and the huge slab of cold meat that so often constituted her midday portion. She knew that she might not leave anything unfinished, and the half-hour allotted to dinner was apt to hurry past her and bring her to her feet at the recital of Grace with half of her allowance still untouched.
“Ma mère, puis-je aller finir au réfectoire?” was the formula which was oftenest on her lips in those early days. And on the permission being given, Frances would valiantly return to the attack.
Supper presented fewer difficulties. A religious or biographical work was read aloud, and whilst giving her full attention to that, Frances found it easier to dispose of the pudding-basin full of soup and the mighty wedge of pudding or the vegetable stew which might form the repast.
But the ethics of the case still troubled her.
Finally she brought her difficulty to Mère Thérèse.
“You must eat in order to work, my child. Remember that you have entered an order where there is much manual labour to be done, and also the instruction of our poor people, our dames pensionnaires to attend to. Had you entered an order where physical austerity is the first object, then indeed you would not complain of having too much.
“But tell me, my little Sister, is it not a greater hardship to you to follow the holy rule of obedience and eat all that is set before you, than it would be to deprive yourself of all but the bare necessities?”