"What a trial that would be!" I exclaimed. "What a humiliation to come out, after making such a stand about entering!"
She laughed quite merrily.
"Humiliation! And what if it were! I don't care a straw if I go into ten convents, and come out of them one after another, so long as I find out the right one in the end. What does anything signify but finding out God's will!"
There was no mistaking the perfect sincerity of her words. It was as clear as sunlight—the one thing necessary, the one thing she cared one straw about, was finding out the will of God. Human respect or any petty human motive had simply gone beyond the range of her apprehension.
"And the silence, Mary?" I said, smiling, as the memory of her old school-day troubles came back on me. "How will you ever keep it? To me it would be the most appalling part of the discipline of La Trappe."
"Well, is it not odd?" she replied. "It is so little appalling to me that I quite long for it. Sometimes I keep repeating the words, 'Perpetual silence!' over and over to myself, as if they were a melody. It was it, I think, that decided me for La Trappe instead of Carmel, where the rule allows them to speak during recreation. It seems to me the hush of tongues must be such a help to union with God. Our tongues are so apt to scare away his presence from our souls."
We came home to dinner. While we were alone in the drawing-room, she asked me to play something to her. She had been passionately fond of the harp, and stood by me listening with evident pleasure, and when I was done began to draw out the chords with her finger.
"Does it not cost you the least little pang to give it up for ever—never to hear a note of music for the rest of your life, Mary?" I said.
"No, not now. I felt it in the beginning; but the only music that has a charm for me now is silence."
We parted, never to meet again, till we meet at the judgment-seat.