window, and she constantly appealed to him: 'Dr. So-and-So
said there wasn't another case like mine in this country, didn't he,
Jim? And he didn't see how it was it hadn't killed me off long ago--you
remember, Jim? And that young Scotch doctor that was so astonished to
see what a family I had--you haven't forgotten him, have you, Jim?' And
the man corroborated all her statements with a pride in having a wife
so uniquely afflicted impossible to describe! Then she insisted I must
see and dress the awful sores that made her shoulders and one breast a
great wound, telling me, as I half fainted over the task, that I didn't
do it half so well as any of the doctors, and begging me, when I had
finished, to stop long enough for her to give me a cup of tea in that
place, insufferable at best with the dirty cobbler and five or six of
the wretched babies, but become, after my _mauvais quart d'heure_ with
the terrible woman, a chamber of horrors in which to delay one further
instant would, I felt, make me daft, or shudderingly sea-sick, for
life!

"I stopped a year and a half in the sisterhood, trying, as I said, to make it
do; but either I'm too logical, or have too keen a sense of the ridiculous,
for the farce of our active-uncloistered-severely-contemplative-enclosed
life, a religious order without a constitution, frowned on by all the
bishops, carrying on its dearest devotional practices in hiding from
all proper ecclesiastical authority, became intolerable to me; and
when, one fine day, there came from 'Reverend Mother' an order to go
and nurse a man ill with typhus--an agricultural laborer living alone
in his cottage--and to my remonstrances that I knew nothing of the
disease, my plea for a companion less ignorant or at least clear
instructions for my own guidance, no answer was vouchsafed save an
oracular assurance that if I did my part of obedience, light would be
given me, I revolted, sent a contumacious message that though I
believed the age of miracles by no means past, I had never seen any
wrought in our order, and could not risk the poor man's life upon so
vague a prospect, and presently bid farewell to my Anglican convent and
to ritualism. Several Sisters have returned to the world since, and
four of these have gone over to Rome. Two of these have married. One,
whom I loved most dearly, is a Poor Clare in Ireland, and the other has
used her fortune to open a creche, where she works harder than any of
her nurses, and c