[I know now, what I did not then, that our house was threatened with total destruction. Not long before Cardinal Wolsey had founded his college at Oxford, and he had obtained a bull from the Pope for suppressing some thirty of the small religious houses and to endow his said college with their revenues; and now there was talk of another suppression. We have in our West country a pithy proverb about showing the cat the way to the cream, which his Eminence might have remembered, if he ever chanced to hear it.]
After mass and sermon, it being a great feast day, we had a better dinner than ordinary, with abundance of sweetmeats and cakes, and recreation all the afternoon till vespers, for which I was very glad. I was cheered by the Bishop's discourse, and yet humbled by it, and I wanted time to think it over: so I slipped away from the rest, and with a garment I was making for Mary Dean's babe, betook myself to the garden chapel, where, having first said my prayers before the shrine, I sat down on a low and roughly hewn stone bench outside the door, and began to think and work at the same time.
I know not how it is, but I can always meditate to better purpose when I have something else to do. In our set hours of meditation I am always possessed to think of any and everything but the subject given us by Mother Superior. It is just then that all my working patterns come into my head. Well, I was sitting sewing a long seam, now working diligently, now stopping to listen to the birds and watch them feeding their young ones (now fully fledged and clamorously following their patient parent from tree to tree), when Amice came and sat down beside me.
"Methinks you spend your holiday soberly," said she, after a little silence, "working away in recreation time."
"I have not done work enough to spoil my recreation," I answered, gayly, "but you know my way of always liking something in my hands. I did not see that any one wanted me, so I came to this solitary place to think about the Bishop's sermon. 'Twas a noble discourse, was it not?"
"Yes, I suppose so," said Amice, and she sighed deeply.
"I thought you would have liked it," I said.
"It just added to my troubles, like everything else. Rosamond, I wish I had never been born, or else that I had been born a milkmaid."
"I don't fancy life is easier to milkmaids than to any one else," I answered. "I think it is as easy here as anywhere, don't you?"
"No!" said she, with a kind of vehemence. "I think it is hard, intolerable, all but impossible. It is all a mass of contradictions from first to last."