ear. I decline to hear."

The Dowager-Duchess lost her temper.

"That is because you know already, and despise money that is made of jam.
Yet coal and beer are swallowed with avidity by young women who have not
forfeited the right to be fastidious. That is the last thing I wished to
say, but you have wrung it from me. Have you no pride? Do you want Society
to say that you have embraced the profession of a Religious, and intend
henceforth to employ your talents in teaching sniffy-nosed schoolgirls
Greek and Algebra and Mathematics, because this Mildare has jilted you?
Again, have you no pride?" She agitated the Britannia-metal teaspoon
furiously in the empty tumbler.

Lady Bridget-Mary took the tumbler away. Why should the humble property
of the Sisters be broken because this kind, fussy woman chose to upbraid?

"You ask, Have I no pride?" she said. "Why should I have pride when Our
Lord is so humble that He does not disdain to take for His bride the woman
Richard Mildare has rejected?"

"You are incorrigible, dearest," said the sobbing Dowager-Duchess, as she
kissed her, "and Castleclare must use all his influence with the Holy
Father to induce the Comtesse de Lutetia to give you the veil. All of you
think I am damned, and possibly I may be, but if so I shall be afforded an
opportunity (which will not be mine in this life) of giving Captain
Mildare a piece of my mind!"

So the Dowager-Duchess melted out of the story, and Lady Bridget-Mary
Bawne became a nun.

X

This is what the Mother-Superior wrote to her kinswoman, with her mobile,
eloquent lips folded closely together as she thought, and her grave eyes
following the swift journey of the pen as it formed the sentences:

_"Now let me speak to you of Lynette Mildare. I have never
thought it necessary to make the slightest disguise of my
great partiality for this, the dearest of all the many
children given me by Our Lord since I resigned my crown of
earthly motherhood to Him."_

She stopped, remembering what another great lady, also a relative of hers,
had remarked when it was first made public that she intended to enter the
Novitiate:

"Indeed! It would seem, then, that you are devoid of ambition, my dear,
unlike the other people of your house."

She had said, paraphrasing a retort previously made:

"Does it strike you as lack of ambition that one of our family should
prefer Christ before any earthly spouse?"

What a base u