accredited abroad, her blunders seem due to incomplete knowledge
rather than to any inability to comprehend the spirit of a people with
whom, indeed, she had many points of sympathy. She could penetrate that
coldness and constraint of manner so repelling to French natures, and
has said of us, with unconventional truth, that our character is in
reality more vehement than theirs; but with less mastery over our
emotions themselves, we have more mastery over the expression of our
emotions. Among her chosen school-comrades were several English girls,
but on leaving the convent their paths separated, and in her after life
she had but rare opportunities for renewing these early friendships.

Some eighteen months had elapsed in this fashion when Aurore began to
tire of _diablerie_. The victim remained undiscoverable. The store of
practical jokes was exhausted. Her restless spirit, pent up within those
convent walls, was thirsting for a new experience,--something to fill
her heart and life.

It came in the dawn of a religious enthusiasm--different from her
mystical dream of _Corambe_, which however poetical was out of harmony
with the spirit and ritual of a Catholic convent. But monastic life had
its poetical aspects also; and through these it was that its
significance first successfully appealed to her. An evening in the
chapel, a Titian picture representing Christ on the Mount of Olives, a
passage chanced upon in the "Lives of the Saints," brought impressions
that awoke in her a new fervor, and inaugurated a period of ardent
Catholicism. All vagueness was gone from her devotional aspirations,
which now acquired a direct personal import. The change brought a
revolution in her general behavior. She was understood to have been
"converted." "Madcap" was now nicknamed "Sainte Aurore" by her profane
school-fellows, and she formed the serious desire and intention of
becoming a nun.

The sisters, a practical-minded community, behaved with great good sense
and discretion. Without distressing the youthful proselyte by casting
doubts on her "vocation," they reminded her that the consideration was a
distant one, as for years to come her first duty would be to her
relatives, who would never sanction her present determination. Her
confessor, the Abbe Premord, a Jesuit and man of the world, was likewise
kindly discouraging; and perceiving that her zeal was leading her to
morbid self-accusation and asceticism of mood, he shrewdly enjoined