"You are complimentary to convents, Bianca. Maudite in one breath, enfer in another!"
"They are all that, and worse!" intemperately responded the Italian girl. "They are—mais n'importe; c'est fini pour moi. I had to beat down my heart then, and stop in one. Ah! I know not how I did it. I look back and wonder. Seven years!"
"But who paid for you all that time?"
"My mother was not poor. She had enough for that. She made the arrangements with a priest when she was dying, and paid the money to him. The convent educated me, and dressed me, and made me hard. Their cold rules beat down my rebellious heart; beat it down to hardness. I should not have been so hard but for that convent!"
"Oh, you are hard, then?" was the remark of Herbert Dare.
"I can be!" nodded Mademoiselle Varsini. "Better not cross me!"
"And how did you get out of the convent?"
"When I was nineteen, they sent me out into a situation, to teach music and my own language, and French and English. They taught well in the convent: I could speak English then as readily as I speak it now: and they gave me a box of clothes and four five-franc pieces, saying that was the last of my mother's effects. What cared I? Had they turned me out penniless, I should have jumped to go. I served in that first situation two years. It was easy, and it was good pay."
"French people?"
"But certainly: Parisians. It was not more than one mile from the convent. There was but one little pupil."