Oh, those baths
in the marble tank, my Father! I used to lie awake through the whole
hot southern night, and think of that plunge at sunrise under the last
stars. For we were in a burning country, and I pined for the tall green
woods and the cold stream of my father's valley; and when I had cooled
my limbs in the tank I lay all day in the scant cypress shade and
dreamed of my next bath.

My mother pined for the coolness till she died; then the Empress put me
in a convent and I was forgotten. The convent was on the side of a bare
yellow hill, where bees made a hot buzzing in the thyme. Below was the
sea, blazing with a million shafts of light; and overhead a blinding
sky, which reflected the sun's glitter like a huge baldric of steel.
Now the convent was built on the site of an old pleasure-house which a
holy Princess had given to our Order; and a part of the house was left
standing with its court and garden. The nuns had built all about the
garden; but they left the cypresses in the middle, and the long marble
tank where the Princess and her ladies had bathed. The tank, however,
as you may conceive, was no longer used as a bath; for the washing of
the body is an indulgence forbidden to cloistered virgins; and our
Abbess, who was famed for her austerities, boasted that, like holy
Sylvia the nun, she never touched water save to bathe her finger-tips
before receiving the Sacrament. With such an example before them, the
nuns were obliged to conform to the same pious rule, and many, having
been bred in the convent from infancy, regarded all ablutions with
horror, and felt no temptation to cleanse the filth from their flesh;
but I, who had bathed daily, had the freshness of clear water in my
veins, and perished slowly for want of it, like your garden herbs in a
drought.

My cell did not look on the garden, but on the steep mule-path leading
up the cliff, where all day long the sun beat as if with flails of
fire, and I saw the sweating peasants toil up and down behind their
thirsty asses, and the beggars whining and scraping their sores in the
heat. Oh, how I hated to look out through the bars on that burning
world! I used to turn away from it, sick with disgust, and lying on my
hard bed, stare up by the hour at the ceiling of my cell. But flies
crawled in hundreds on the ceiling, and the hot noise they made was
worse than the glare. Sometimes, at an hour when I knew myself
unobserved, I tore off my stifling gown, and hung i