“Ah!” said Sœur Eugénie, “au moins vous serez quitte de tout cela demain!” She picked up a strand of the long silken mass and let it fall again disdainfully.
“What a joy, to have finished with one’s coiffure for ever!” she remarked complacently. Then she produced hairpins which had served in the same capacity many times before, and twisted the novice’s hair into a species of strange outstanding chignon which had been fashionable some forty years previously in Paris.
“Vous voila!” she said triumphantly, when Frances had suffered under her vigorous ministrations for what seemed a long while.
She produced a small, very old, folding mirror, and Frances gazed in silence at the monstrous erection. She was more distressed on Rosamund’s account than on her own, and tried surreptitiously to pull and coax the strained-back hair over her forehead and temples.
When the dress and veil were fastened she looked at herself in the glass again and saw with relief that the coarse lace draped over her head and face was thick enough to conceal Sœur Eugénie’s disastrous manifestations of her skill.
Then she pulled on the white cotton gloves that lay on the bed and tried to collect her thoughts whilst waiting to be summoned to the chapel.
It distressed her a little that her mind should still be vibrating from that little while with Rosamund. Nevertheless she was aware of an increasing happiness that seemed to pervade her soul, and to make all lesser, more surface preoccupations, of no account.
In a few moments she heard the brisk and heavy tread of the novice-mistress, and rose to meet her.
Mère Thérèse looked at her very kindly, said “Vous êtes contente, chère petite?” more as though stating a fact than asking a question, and on the monosyllabic but heartfelt reply of the novice, blessed her very tenderly. Then she took her downstairs. Frances followed her obediently to an unaccustomed entrance of the chapel, that which was used by the professed nuns, the lady boarders and visitors to the convent.
The novices always went in and out by a small side-door, which gave directly on to that part of the chapel where the community stalls were placed.