Her sense of proportion, like that of all those who lead the cloistered life altered strangely and rapidly.
Her letters to Rosamund, the aching dread lest the new life should separate her irrevocably from Rosamund, the little tender recollections of their life together, of Lady Argent’s kindness, of Hazel and her two babies, that had thronged her mind at first, had given place imperceptibly but with the strangest rapidity, to other preoccupations and other aspirations.
Nowadays, the things which mattered most were naturally those which filled the atmosphere into which she found herself transplanted.
The field of her external interests was naturally an extremely narrow one. The novice-mistress, the small society of her fellow-novices, and an occasional one or two of the older nuns, were the only human beings with whom she ever came into contact, and this intercourse, extremely limited as it was, took place either in one of the few rooms where speech was permitted, or in the narrow confines of the convent garden. It was as brief as possible, and was always, except when receiving direct spiritual guidance from Mère Thérèse, as impersonal as the sense of discipline on either part could make it.
Her small duties, for the faithful accomplishment of which she would receive no commendation, loomed enormous to Frances. She took a joyful pride in the thorough sweeping of the only long corridor which the house contained, and which had been given into her charge, and she looked forward anxiously to her bi-weekly mornings in the kitchen, where the lay-sisters laughed furtively and good-naturedly at her utter ignorance of those primary laws of le ménage which never seemed to present any difficulties to her French and Spanish contemporaries. On two evenings a week she taught in an elementary class of the poor school attached to the convent, and was gradually learning not to tremble at the apprehension that the six or seven-year-old urchins would decline to be instructed in the multiplication table by anyone so young and so frightened.
The novices, as a rule, were never sent amongst the lady boarders, but when she had been at the convent some four months, Frances was told that she was to work regularly under the Mère Econome. She thus found herself deputed occasionally to take an interview on behalf of the much-occupied Mère Caroline, so that she was not without fugitive intercourse with those whom she had soon learned to designate, in all due charity and perfectly unconscious arrogance, as “les personnes du dehors.”
During these brief interviews the little novice was always highly conscious of the gulf which should lie between the manners of ordinary social intercourse and the demeanour of a young religious obliged through obedience to hold a needful conversation with an inhabitant of the outer world.
She was careful to say the prescribed Ave Maria to herself on the threshold of the small parlour where these conversations took place, and would enter holding herself unconsciously more upright than usual, her eyes downcast, and her hands tucked away under her wide sleeves. It had frequently been impressed upon her that a religious “ne s’affaise pas sur sa chaise comme si elle avait l’habitude des fauteuils,” and consequently she sat on the extreme edge of her chair, very much erect, and with her feet carefully concealed beneath the ample folds of her habit.
The business in hand she disposed of as rapidly as the extreme eloquence with which most of the lady boarders were afflicted, permitted.
It was no temptation to Frances to prolong the conversations in the parlour. She was naturally shy, and had, all her life, more or less unconsciously, preferred silence to speech.