to be admitted
as a novice to the convent of Santa Chiara. Though it was the common way
of disposing of portionless girls, the liberal views of her cousins had
reassured Fulvia, and she woke to her fate too late to escape it. She
was to enter on her novitiate on the morrow; but even had delay been
possible she knew that both the civil and religious authorities would
sustain her family in their course.

Her cousins, knowing her independent spirit, and perhaps fearing an
outcry if they sequestered her too closely, had thought to soften her
resistance by placing her in a convent noted for its leniencies; but to
Fulvia such surroundings were more repugnant than the strictest monastic
discipline. The corruption of the religious orders was a favourite topic
with her father's friends, and the Venetian nuns were noted throughout
Italy for their frivolous and dissipated lives; but nothing that Fulvia
had heard or imagined approached the realities that awaited her. At
first the mere sense of imprisonment, of being cut off forever from the
world of free thought and action which had been her native element,
overwhelmed every other feeling, and she lay numb in the clutch of fate.
But she was too young for this merciful torpor to last, and with the
returning consciousness of her situation came the instinctive effort to
amend it. How she longed then to have been buried in some strict order,
where she might have spent her days in solitary work and meditation! How
she loathed the petty gossip of the nuns, their furtive reaching after
forbidden pleasures! The blindest bigotry would have been less
insufferable than this clandestine commerce with the world, the
strictest sequestration than this open parody of the monastic calling.
She sought in vain among her companions for an answering mind. Many,
like herself, were in open rebellion against their lot; but for reasons
so different that the feeling was an added estrangement. At last the
longing to escape over-mastered every other sensation. It became a fixed
idea, a devouring passion. She did not trust herself to think of what
must follow, but centred every faculty on the effort of evasion.

At this point in her story her growing distress had made it hard for Odo
to gather more than a general hint of her meaning. It was clear,
however, that she had found her sole hope of escape lay in gaining the
friendship of one of the more favoured nuns. Her own position in the
community was of the hu