sacrifice
than six or seven o'clock. These nuns lived on a little coarse food, and
spent the day in prayer. She thought of their aching knees in the long
vigils of their adorations. She understood that the inward happiness
their life gives them compensates them for all their privations. She
understood that they are the only ones who are happy, yet the knowledge
did not help her; she felt that she would never be happy in their
happiness, and a great sorrow came over her. Mass was over, and again
the beautiful procession, with bowed heads and meekly folded veils,
glided out of the church. Only the watchers remained.

Last night she had sat watching the stars shining on the convent garden.
There were, as Owen said, twenty millions of suns in the Milky Way;
beyond the Milky Way there were other constellations of which we know
nothing, nebulae which time has not yet resolved into stars, or stars so
distant that time has not yet brought their light hither. But why seek
mystery beyond this poor planet? It furnishes enough, surely. That we
should see the stars, that we should know the stars, that we should
place God above the stars--are not these common facts as wonderful as
the stars themselves? That those twenty or five-and-twenty women should
give up all the seduction of life for the sake of an idea, accepting
Owen's theory that it is but an idea, even so the wonder of it is not
less; even from Owen's point of view is not this convent as wonderful as
the stars?

On coming out of church, she was told that in half-an-hour her breakfast
would be ready in the parlour, and to loosen the mental tension--she had
thought and felt a great deal in the last hour--she asked the lay sister
who were the nuns who sang in the choir. The lay sister answered her
perfunctorily. Evelyn could see that she was not open at that moment to
conversation. She guessed that the sister had work to attend to, and was
not surprised that she did not come back to take the things away.
Although only just begun, the day had already begun to seem long. She
proposed to herself some pious reading; and wondered how she was going
to get through the day. She would have liked to go into the garden; but
she did not know the rules of the convent, and feared to transgress
them. However, she was free to go to her room. The books she had brought
with her would help her to get through the morning.

Berlioz's _Memoirs I_ The faded voices she had heard that morning
singin