idleness; Angelique was far too sensible
for that. She took counsel with her father, and found work for the men,
and even the children, in the gardens and lands belonging to the abbey.
Their wages were small, but each day good food was prepared in the
kitchens--Angelique had no belief in bad cooking--and was wheeled out by
the sisters in little carts as far as the garden walls, where the
workmen could eat it while it was hot. Then some of the children or
women were employed as messengers to carry bowls with dinners to the old
and ill. Of course some of these were in the abbey infirmary, and were
looked after by the nuns, and especially by Angelique, who took the one
who seemed to need most care into her own room, while she slept on the
damp floor--for half the sickness at Port Royal was due to the marshes
that surrounded it. If it happened that she had her cell to herself,
there was no fire to warm her, yet she often got up in the night to
carry wood to the long dormitory where several of the nuns slept, so
that they, at least, should not suffer from cold.

All the daily expenses she saw to herself, as debt was hateful to her,
and she and the sisters denied themselves food and wore the cheapest and
coarsest clothes, not for the sake of their own souls, but of other
people's bodies.

* * * * *

In many ways, though she did not know it and certainly would have been
shocked to hear it, Angelique resembled the Puritans, whose influence
in England was daily increasing. She had a special dislike to money
being spent on decorations and ornaments in churches, or in embroidered
vestments for priests, and never would allow any of them in her own. She
also invented a loose and ugly grey dress for the girls to wear who
desired admission to the convent, instead of permitting them to put on
the clothes they had worn at home, as had always been the custom. The
first to wear it was her own sister Anne, who after leading the gay life
of a Parisian young lady for a year, at fifteen resolved to abandon it
for ever and join her three sisters at Port Royal.

It is possible that monsieur Arnauld may have regretted his hastiness in
forcing Angelique and Agnes to become nuns when he saw one daughter
after another following in their footsteps. Anne he had expected to
remain, for she was full of little fancies and vanities, and he could
not imagine her submitting to the work which he knew the abbess loved.

H