ly agreeable."

This passage is one of the very few in which appears the wise, practical
woman, the founder of an order and of many monasteries, who lived side by
side in the same body, the constant associate of the lyrical saint.
Evelyn tried to picture her to herself, and two pictures alternated in
her thoughts. She saw deep, eager, passionate eyes, and a frail,
exhausted body borne along easily by the soul, and doing the work of the
unconquerable soul. In the second picture, there were the same consuming
eyes, the same wasted body, but the expression was quite different. The
saint's manner was the liveliest, happiest manner, and Evelyn thought of
the privilege of such companionship, and she envied those who had walked
with her, hearing her speak.

The little pond at her feet was full of fair reflections of the sky and
trees, and the idea of convent life lay on the pages of the book even as
fair. In itself it was disparate and vague, but on the pages of the book
it floated clear and distinct. She asked if any of the Wimbledon nuns
lived a life of that intense inward rapture which St. Teresa deemed
essential if a sister were to be allowed to remain in the convent of St.
Joseph at Avila, and the coincidence of the names gave her pause. This
convent's patron saint was St. Joseph, and she sought for some
resemblance between the Reverend Mother and St. Teresa. She wondered if
she, Evelyn, were a nun, towards which of the nuns would her personal
sympathies incline: would she love better Sister Veronica or Sister Mary
John? It might be Mother Mary Hilda. It would be one of the three. There
was not one among the others likely to interest her in the least. She
tried to imagine this friendship: it assumed a vague shape and then
dissolved in the distance. But would the Reverend Mother tolerate this
friendship, or would it be promptly cut down to the root according to
the advice of St. Teresa?

Her thoughts pursued their way, now and then splashing as they leaped
out of the soul's dimness. Only the splashing of the fish broke the
stillness of the garden, and startled at a sudden gurgling sound, she
rose, in time to see a shadowy shape sinking with a motion of fins amid
the weeds. That she should be living in a convent, that she should have
repented of her sins, that the fish should leap and fall back with
strange, gurgling sound, filled her with wonderment. The vague autumn
blue expressed some vague yearning, some indistinct as