"So that's it, is it? I thought as much. You want to go into partnership with the Mother in the nun business, eh?"
"My mother wished me to become a nun, and I wish it myself, sir."
"Your mother was a baby—that's what she was."
"My mother was an angel, sir," I said, bridling up, "and when she was dying she hoped I should become a nun, and I can never become anything else under any circumstance."
"Bah!" said my father, with a contemptuous lift of the hand, and then turning to the Reverend Mother he said:
"Hark here, ma'am. There's an easy way and a hard way in most everything. I take the easy way first, and if it won't work I take the hard way next, and then it's stiff pulling for the people who pull against me. I came to Rome to take my daughter home. I don't feel called upon to explain why I want to take her home, or what I'm going to do with her when I get her there. I believe I've got the rights of a father to do what I mean to do, and that it will be an ugly business for anybody who aids and abets my daughter in resisting her father's will. So I'll leave her here a week longer, and when I come back, I'll expect her to be ready and waiting and willing—ready and waiting and willing, mind you—to go along with me."
After saying this my father faced about and with his heavy flat step went out of the room, whereupon the Bishop bowed to the Reverend Mother and followed him.
My heart was by this time in fierce rebellion—all that the pacifying life of the convent-school had done for me in ten years being suddenly swept away—and I cried:
"I won't do it! I won't do it!"
But I had seen that the Reverend Mother's face had suddenly become very white while my father spoke to her at the end and now she said, in a timid, almost frightened tone: