. Item, the resolution not to wish that
her hair had never been cut off. Item, being stifled in summer and
frozen in winter, in her cell. Item, appreciating that it was the best
cell, and that she was better off than the other sisters.

Repeat the items for half a century, sum them up, and offer them to God
as a meet and fitting sacrifice--the destruction, by fine degrees of
petty suffering, of one woman's whole life, almost from the beginning,
and quite to the end, with the total annihilation of all its human
possibilities, of love, of motherhood, of reasonable enjoyment and
legitimate happiness. That was the formula for salvation which Maria
Addolorata had received with the veil.

And not only had she received it. It had been thrust upon her, because
she chanced to be the only available daughter of the ancient house of
Braccio, to fill the hereditary seat beneath the wooden canopy, as
abbess of the Subiaco Carmelites. If there had been another sister, less
fair, more religiously disposed, that sister would have been chosen in
Maria's stead. But there was no other; and there must be a young Braccio
nun, to take the place of the elder one, when the latter should have
filled her account to overflowing with little items to be paid for with
the gold of certain salvation.

That a sinful woman, full of sorrows, and weary of the world, might
silently bow her head under the nun's veil, and wear out with prayerful
austerity the deep-cut letters of her sin's story, that, at least, was a
thing Maria could understand. There were faces amongst the sisters that
haunted her in her solitude, lips that could have told much, but which
said only 'Miserere'; eyes that had looked on love, and that fixed
themselves now only on the Cross; cheeks blanched with grief and
hollowed as the marble of an ancient fountain by often flowing tears;
hearts that had given all, and had been beaten and bruised and rejected.
The convent was for them; the life was a life for them; for them there
was no freedom beyond these walls, in the living world, nor anywhere on
this side of death. They had done right in coming, and they did right in
staying; they were reasonable when they prayed that they might have
time, before they died, to be sorry for their sins and to touch again
the hem of the garment of innocence.

But even they, if they were told that it would be right, would they not
rather shorten their time to a day, even to one instant, of aggregated
pai