"What passes in that conversation with the unknown, that interview with the Shadow? Does she succeed in escaping from self, and in leaving the earth, in gaining, on the threshold of Eternity, the inconceivable Spouse, or does the soul, powerless to spring on high, remain riveted to the soil?
"We figure her to ourselves, her face bent forward, her hands joined, making appeal to herself, concentrating herself, in order to pour herself forth the better, and we imagine her thus sickly, with no strength left, trying to set her soul on fire in a shivering frame. But who can tell if on certain nights she attains to it?
"Ah! those poor lamps of exhausted oil, of flames almost dead, which tremble in the obscurity of the sanctuary, what will God make of them?
"Then there was the family present at the taking the habit, and if the daughter filled me with enthusiasm I could not restrain myself from pitying the mother. Think if the daughter died, the mother would embrace her, would perhaps speak to her, or if she did not recognize her, it would at least not be with her own good will; but in this case it is not the body, but the very soul of her child that dies before her eyes. Of her own accord her child knows her no longer, it is the contemptuous end of an affection. You will admit that for a mother this is very hard."
"Yes, but this so-called ingratitude, gained at the price of God knows what struggles, is it not, even apart from the divine vocation, the most equitable repartition of human love? Think that this elect creature becomes the scapegoat of sins committed, and like a lamentable daughter of Danaus she will unceasingly pour the offering of her mortifications and prayers, of her vigils and fastings, into the bottomless vessel of offences and crimes. Ah! if you knew what it was to repair the sins of the world. In regard to this I remember that one day the abbess of the Benedictines in the Rue Tournefort said to me: 'Since our tears are not holy enough, nor our souls pure enough, God makes trial of us in our bodies.' Here are long illnesses which cannot be cured, illnesses which doctors fail to understand, and we make thus much expiation for others.
"But if you will think over the ceremony which is just ended, you need not be affected beyond measure or compare it to the well-known ceremonies of a funeral; the postulant whom you saw has not yet pronounced her final vows, she can if she choose leave the convent, and return to her own home. At present she is in regard to her mother, a child in a foreign country, a child at school, but she is not a dead child.
"You may say what you please, but there is a tragedy in that door which closed upon her."
"Therefore in the Benedictine convent in the Rue Tournefort, the scene takes place in the interior of the convent, and the family is not present, the mother is spared, but mitigated thus, the ceremony is but a mere form, almost a foolish rule in the seclusion wherein the Faith is hidden."
"Those nuns are also Benedictines of the perpetual Adoration, are they not?"
"Yes, do you know their convent?"