"Mrs. Thorpe has no right to order us so!" I said, speaking out what I had been thinking.
"She has a perfect right, seeing that my aunt has placed us under her care!" said Amabel, "Think too, how kind she has been to us. How good she was last night; she did not wish to turn you out of her house, because you had a headache, like that other woman."
I remembered this, and began to feel ashamed of myself, for thinking of our kind hostess as I had done, and at last I agreed with Amabel that we had done wrong, and must ask pardon, as much as if it had been Mother Superior that we had offended.
My heart began to feel a little lightened, when arrived at this point, for the time when conscience stings us worst, is while we are refusing to allow that it stings at all. We knew that Mrs. Thorpe spent a little time in her closet every morning before she came to breakfast, and we determined to seek her there.
"There is another thing I have been considering!" said Amabel, when this matter was finally settled. "We have lived a very idle life, lately. Just think! We have been here nearly three weeks, and what have we to show for it? Not one thing."
"We have read a good deal!" I answered.
"Yes! But not in a way to do us any good. We have not done any lessons, or worked, either for ourselves or the poor; we have not kept to any rule, such as we have always been used to."
"I know it!" I answered! "I have thought of it a good many times. But then you know, Amabel, we have never been used to making rules, or deciding anything for ourselves, and somehow one does not know how to set about it."
"But people must learn to make rules for themselves!" said Amabel, with that gentle decision which has always characterized her, when her mind is made up. "Only a very small part of the people in the world can live in convents: otherwise everything would be at a stand still. And those who live in the world, must often decide for themselves, and regulate their own conduct, and I don't see why we should not do so."
"But, Amabel, we cannot observe all our own convent rules here!" I objected. "It would turn the house upside down, if we were to insist on having our meals at just such times as we used to at St. Jean."