Don Manuel de Lara: And so you long for Paradise?

Sister Pilar: With a great longing.

Don Manuel de Lara: I sometimes dream of Paradise.

Sister Pilar: And how does it show in your dreams?

Don Manuel de Lara (smiling a little): I fear it is mightily like what the trovaresnot the monks—tell us of hell.

Sister Pilar (severely): Then it must be a dream sent you by a fiend of the Moorish Paradise, which is indeed hell.

Don Manuel de Lara: That may be. And how does it show in your dreams?

Sister Pilar: A great, cool, columned, empty hall, and I feel at once small and vast and shod with the wind. And all the while I am aware that the coolness and vastness and spaciousness of the hall and my body’s lightness is because there is no sin.

Don Manuel de Lara: But what can you know of sin in a nunnery?

Sister Pilar looks at him suspiciously, but his expression remains impenetrable.