that the free
air of heaven, be it with the winds or the rain, might beat upon me,
so that I might live and love _as I like_, do right _as I like_; ay,
and do wrong _if_ I liked, with the free will which is my _own_.

We were told that the outer world, with all its sorrows and trials,
and dangers--how I remember the Reverend Mother's words and face, and
how they impressed me then, and how I should laugh at them,
_now!_--that the world was but a valley of tears. We were warned that
all that awaited us, if we left the fold, was _misery_; that the joys
of this world were _bitter_ to the taste, its pleasures _hollow_, and
its griefs _lasting_.

We believed it. And yet, when the choice was actually ours to make,
we chose all we had been taught to dread and despise. Why? I wonder.
For the same reason as Eve ate the apple, I suppose. I would, if I had
been Eve. I almost wish I could go back now, for a day, to the cool
white rooms, to see the nuns flitting about like black and white
ghosts, with only a jingle of beads to warn one of their coming, see
the blue sky through the great bare windows, and the shadows of the
trees lengthening on the cold flagged floors, hear the bells going
ding-dong, ding-dong, and the murmur of the sea in the distance, and
the drone of the school, and the drone of the chapel, to go back, and
feel once more the dull sort of content, the calmness, the rest!

But no, no! I should be trembling all the while lest the blessed doors
leading back to that _horrible_ world should never open to me again.

The sorrows and trials of the world! I suppose the Reverend Mother
really meant it; and if I had gone on living there till my face was
wrinkled like hers, poor woman, I might have thought so too, in the
end, and talked the same nonsense.

Was it really I that endured such a life for seventeen years? O God! I
wonder that the sight of the swallows coming and going, the sound of
the free waves, did not drive me mad. Twist as I will my memory, I
cannot recall _that_ Molly of six months ago, whose hours and days
passed and dropped all alike, all lifeless, just like the slow tac,
tac, tac of our great horloge in the Refectory, and were to go on as
slow and as alike, for ever and ever, till she was old, dried,
wrinkled, and then died. The real Molly de Savenaye's life began on
the April morning when that dear old turbaned fairy godmother of ours
carried us, poor little Cinderellas, away in her coach. Well do I