e heard the Sisters of Solesmes, those of Paris sound
provincial.'"

"And you saw the Abbess of Saint Cecilia. Why, when I think of it, is
not she the writer of a Treatise on Prayer (_Traite de l'Oraison_) which
I read when I was at La Trappe, and which was not, I believe, regarded
with favour at the Vatican?"

"Yes, she it is. But you are making the greatest mistake in imagining
that her book was not approved at Rome. It was examined there, like
every book of the kind, through a magnifying glass, strained through a
sieve, picked over line by line, turned inside out and upside down; but
the theologians employed in this pious custom-house service acknowledged
and certified that this work, based on the soundest principles of
mysticism, was learnedly, impeccably, desperately orthodox.

"I may add that the volume was printed privately by the Abbess herself,
helped by some of the nuns, in a little hand-press belonging to the
convent, and has never been in circulation. It is, in fact, an epitome
of doctrine, the essential extract of her teaching, and was more
especially intended for those of her daughters who are unable to have
the benefit of her instruction and lectures, because they live away from
Solesmes, in other convents that she has founded.

"Why in these days, when for ten years past the Benedictine Sisters have
made a study of Latin, when many of them translate from Hebrew and Greek
and are skilled in exegesis, when others draw and paint the pages of
missals, reviving the art of the illuminators of the Middle Ages, when
others again--as, for instance, Mother Hildegarde--are organists of the
highest attainment, you may easily understand that the woman who
directs them all, the woman who has created in her Sisterhoods a school
of practical mysticism and of religious art, is a very remarkable
person; nay, in these days of frivolous devotions and ignorant piety,
quite unique."

"Why, she is one of the great Abbesses of the Middle Ages," cried
Durtal.

"She is the crowning work of Dom Gueranger, who took her in hand almost
as a child and kneaded and mollified her soul with long patience; then
he transplanted her into a special greenhouse, watching her growth in
the Lord day after day; and you see the result of this forcing and high
culture."

"Yes, and even this does not hinder some persons from regarding convents
as the homes of idleness and reservoirs of folly. When you think that
obscure idiots write to the p