"Should you ask me? I am a woman of the world. I live in a city of more than a million souls—in the company of thousands of these women-devils. I see hundreds of them daily. I may be one myself. If you think I am a devil, you ought not to ask me to tell you the truth. You should not listen to me or believe me."
She felt the cruelty of this. It was like replying logically to a child who had earnestly asked to be told something that might wreck its faith and happiness.
The storm was passing. In a few minutes this strange interview would end: he back to his cell again: she back to the world. Already it had its deep influence over them both. She, more than he, felt its almost tragical gravity, and was touched by its pathos. These two young human souls, true and pure, crossing each other's path-way in life thus strangely, now looked into each other's eyes, as two travellers from opposite sides of the world meet and salute and pass in the midst of the desert.
"I shall believe whatever you tell me," he said, with tremulous eagerness.
The occasion lifted her ever-serious nature to the extraordinary; and trying to cast the truth that she wished to teach into the mould which would be most familiar to him, she replied:
"Do you know who are most like you monks in consecration of life? It is the women—the good women of the world. What are your great vows? Are they not poverty, labor, self-denial, chastity, prayer? Well, there is not one of these but is kept in the hearts of good women. Only, you monks keep your vows for your own sakes, while women keep them as well for the sakes of others. For the sake of others they live and die poor. Sometimes they even starve. You never do that. They work for others as you have never worked; they pray for others as you have never prayed. In sickness and weariness, day and night, they deny themselves and sacrifice themselves for others as you have never done—never can do. You keep yourselves pure. They keep themselves pure and make others pure. If you are the best examples of personal holiness that may be found in the world apart from temptation, they are the higher types of it maintained amid temptations that never cease. You are content to pray for the world, they also work for it. If you wish to see, in the most nearly perfect form that is ever attained in this world, love and sympathy and forgiveness, if you wish to find vigils and patience and charity—go to the good women of the world. They are all through the world, of which you know nothing—in homes, and schools, and hospitals; with the old, the suffering, the dying. Sometimes they are clinging to the thankless, the dissolute, the cruel; sometimes they are ministering to the weary, the heart-broken, the deserted. No, no! Some women may be what you call them, devils—"
She blushed all at once with recollection of her earnestness. It was the almost elemental simplicity of her listener that had betrayed her into it. Meantime, as she had spoken, his quickly changing mood had regained its first pitch. She seemed to rise higher—to be arraigning him and his ideals of duty. In his own sight he seemed to grow smaller, shrink up, become despicable; and when she suddenly ceased speaking, he lifted his eyes to her, alas! too plainly now betraying his heart.
"And you are one of these good women?"
"I have nothing to say of myself; I spoke of others. I may be a devil."
For an instant through the scattering clouds the sunlight had fallen in through the window, lighting up her head as with a halo. It fell upon the cowl also, which lay on the floor like a luminous heap. She went to it, and, lifting it, said to him: