“The friars never taught me anything. Father Bevis tried to help me, but he did not know how. My Lord was the only one who understood.”
“Understood? Understood what?”
“Who understood me, and who understood God.”
“Clarice, what manner of tongue art thou talking? ’Tis none I never learned.”
No, for Clarice was beginning to lisp the language of Canaan, and “they that kept the fair were men of this world.” What wonder if she and her thoroughly time-serving mother found it impossible to understand each other?
“I cannot make thee out, lass. If thou wert aware afore thou wert wed that thou hadst a vocation, ’twas right wicked of thee not to tell thy confessor and thy mistress, both. But I cannot see how it well could, when thou wert all head o’er ears o’ love with some gallant or other—the saints know whom. I reckon it undecent, in very deed, Clarice, to meddle up a love-tale with matters of religion. I do wonder thou hast no more sense of fitness and decorum.”
“It were a sad thing,” said Clarice quietly, “if only irreligious people might love each other.”
“Love each other! Dear heart, thy brains must be made o’ forcemeat! Thou hast got love, and religion, and living, and all manner o’ things, jumbled up together in a pie. They’ve nought to do with each other, thou silly lass.”
“If religion has nought to do with living, Dame, under your good pleasure, what has it to do with?”
A query which Dame La Theyn found it as difficult to comprehend as to answer. In her eyes, religion was a thing to take to church on Sunday, and life was restricted to the periods when people were not in church. When she laid up her Sunday gown in lavender, she put her religion in with it. Of course, nuns were religious every day, but nobody else ever thought of such an unreasonable thing. Clarice’s new ideas, therefore, to her, were simply preposterous and irrational.