She had only been in all innocence a nun for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years a nun! Think of it! There were the years, too, that she was pupil and novice, making altogether twenty-six years behind the walls of a convent, subjected to the convent discipline and the weary convent habit. And now she has broken loose, like a prisoner who makes a rope of his bedclothes to escape over walls to freedom.
She had compelled—how, she did not disclose—the Church to set her at liberty, and now was beginning to live her own life for the first time. The life which she left at sixteen she has now taken up again at the age of forty-two. She looks like a person of sixty.
I could not forbear putting the indiscreet question, why she had broken away? And she replied, what was evidently the truth, that when she noticed she was beginning to grow old, a doubt arose within her as to whether the life in the world outside was not richer than the life behind the convent walls. She has given all her large fortune to the Church, and now lives on a scanty allowance grudgingly doled out to her by one of the sisters.
But she is happy as a queen in two little rooms, where she is her own mistress, able to eat and drink when she wants to, and as much as she likes. And she can serve her God unbidden by the ding-dong of the chapel bell—for she has not abjured her faith.
The one desire of her heart now is to find a man who’ll marry her. Her modesty is certainly touching. She doesn’t mind who he is, or what he looks like, if only she may be granted the wonderful happiness of having a husband. I lied my utmost to comfort her.
And if she can’t get a husband, she intends to adopt a child.
A really sick, starving, miserable child. I said tamely, that if I cherished—as God forbid that I should—such a fad, I would, at all events, seek out a healthy, pretty, and well-nourished infant. Whereupon she answered, “I don’t want a child to live for my sake; I want to live for the sake of a child.” She is a fine, but rather queer creature. And she has promised to come and see me every day.
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Sister Ethel has bet me a palm—she has obviously an empty tub in her room—that if once I had the little boy next door with me for an hour, I should take him to my heart.