A very old lay-sister, in a white coif and shoes that creaked a trifle, pottered about among the statues of the saints, arranging small lamps and vases of flowers, always dropping as she passed the altar a business-like little curtsey. Now and then a child with a veil over her head would slip in at the door, and genuflect, and sink to her knees for a moment's prayer. Sunlight streamed in, multi-colored, through ruby and purple and amber glass, across the white marble Christ who stood with hands outstretched and head bowed, suffering little children to come unto Him....
Joan, who had been reading Rénan (a fact which would have certainly caused her expulsion from that place had it been known), quoted to herself:
"In our bustling civilization, the memory of the life of Galilee has been like the perfume of another world."
It seemed to her one of the true miracles that it should indeed have persisted through our bustling civilization, through persecution and indifference, through crass hysterical religiosity, even to this day; if only in such places as her convent school, and little country churches here and there, and in the homes of the very poor. That lovely, pastoral, gentle life of Galilee, exquisite as the name itself—who could not have been good in Galilee?
"If Archie had lived then, he would have followed Christ," thought Joan suddenly. "Followed him, and fought for him, too. And he'd never have let the Jews get hold of him!"
It was the first time she had thought of her husband in many days....
Archie's letters came with faithful regularity, but he was one of the personalities who do not carry well by letter. He informed her that he missed her, but she was not to hurry home on his account; that Ellen was keeping down the grocer-bill nicely; that the new man he had put on the road wasn't doing well and he thought of putting Johnny Carmichael in his place; that one of the water-pipes had burst and made a spot on the wall, but nothing to fret about; and that if she needed more money be sure to let him know. Or words to that effect.
Archie, somehow, was never quite in the picture. She was better able to reconstruct her lost girlhood without him.
And Archie understood. It was he who had suggested the Convent when Joan's doctor admitted himself dissatisfied with her condition, her slow return to normality.
"You've got a peculiarly sensitive nervous organism to deal with here," the doctor said. "It takes very little to throw such natures off the balance. You say she never speaks of her babies at all? I don't like that! I'd rather have her crying about all over the place."