and representative of the ninety and nine who need no
forgiveness, exasperatingly and mathematically virtuous as a dogma, a
woman against whom no sort of reproach could be brought, and at the mere
sight of whom false witnesses would shrivel up and die, like jelly-fish
in the sun. She not only approved of the convent life, but she liked it.
She was at liberty to do a thousand things which were not permitted to
the nuns, but she had not the slightest inclination to do any of them,
any more than she was inclined to admit that any of them could possibly
be unhappy if they would only pray, sing, sleep, and eat boiled cabbage
at the appointed hours. What had she in common with Maria Addolorata,
except that she was born a princess and a Braccio?

Of what use was it to be a princess by birth, like a dozen or more of
the sisters, or even a noble, like all the others? Of what use or
advantage could anything be, where liberty was not? An even plainer and
more desperate question rose in the young nun's heart, as she leaned her
cheek against the door-post, still warm with the afternoon sun. Of what
use was life, if it was to be lived in the tomb with the accompaniment
of a lifelong funeral service? Why should not God be as well pleased
with suicide as with self-burial? Why should not death all at once, by
the sudden dash of cleanly steel, be as noble and acceptable a sacrifice
as death by sordid degrees of orderly suffering, systematic starvation,
and rigidly regulated misery? Was not life, life--and blood,
blood--whether drawn by drops, or shed from a quick wound in the
splendid redness of one heroic instant? Surely it would be as grand a
thing, if a mere sacrifice were the object, to be laid down stark dead,
with the death-thrust in the heart, at the foot of the altar, in all her
radiant youth and full young beauty, untempted and unsullied, as to fast
and pray through forty querulous years of misery in prison.

But then, there was the virtue of patience. Therein, doubtless, lay the
difference. It was not the death alone that was to please God, but the
long manner of it, the summed-up account of suffering, the interest paid
on the capital of life after it was invested in death. God was to be
pleased with items, and the sum of them. Item, a sleepless night. Item,
a bad cold, caught by kneeling on the damp stones. Item, a dish of
sweets refused on a feast-day. Item, the resolution not to laugh when a
fly settled on the abbess's nose