Evelyn asked her if she had lived in the convent long, and Miss Dingle told her she had lived there for the last three or four years, but she would give no precise answer when Evelyn asked if she hoped to become a nun, or whether she liked her home or the convent the better.
"Now," she said, "I must really go and say some prayers in the church."
Evelyn offered to accompany her, but she said she was well armed, and showed Evelyn several rosaries, which in case of need she would wave in his face.
Sister Mary John was digging in the kitchen garden, and Evelyn told her how she had come upon Miss Dingle in the summer-house surrounded by pious pictures. Leaning on her spade, Sister Mary John looked across the beds thinking, and Evelyn wondered of what. She said at last that Miss Dingle thought too much of the devil.
"We should not waste thoughts on him, all our thoughts should be for God; there is much more pleasure and profit in such thoughts."
"But it does seem a little absurd to imagine that the devil is hiding behind gooseberry bushes."
"The devil is everywhere, temptation is always near."
Evelyn saw that the nun did not care for discussion on the subject of the devil's objectivity, and in the pause in the conversation she noticed Sister Mary John's enormous boots. They looked like a man's boots, and she had a full view of them, for Sister Mary John wore her skirt very short, so that she might be able to dig with greater ease.
"One of the disadvantages of convent life are the few facilities it affords for exercise and for music," she added, with her beautiful smile. "I must have exercise, I can't live without it.... It is extraordinary how differently people are constituted. There is Mother Mary Hilda, she had never been for what I should call a good sharp walk in her life, and she does not know what an ache or a pain is."
The nun pointed with admiration to the bed which she had dug up that morning, and complained of the laziness of the gardener: he had not done this nor that, but he was such a good man—since he became a Catholic.