nd women, with all their limitations, as the only true
exponents of that especial creed, which they then proceed to tear in
pieces with all the ease such an undue advantage of false premise gives
them. None of them have thought of intellectual mercy as being, perhaps,
an integral part of Christian charity. Faith they have in abundance, and
hope also not a little; but charity, though it be for men's earthly ills
and, theoretically, if not always practically, for men's spiritual
shortcomings, is rigidly forbidden for the errors of men's minds. Why?
No thinking man can help asking the little question which grows great in
the unanswering silence that follows it.

All this is not intended as an apology for what the young nun, Maria
Addolorata, afterwards did, though much of it is necessary in
explanation of her deeds, which, however they may be regarded, brought
upon her and others their inevitable logical consequences. Still less is
it meant, in any sense, as an attack upon the conventual system of the
cloistered orders, which system was itself a consequence of spiritual,
intellectual and political history, and has a prime right to be judged
upon the evidence of its causes, and not by the shortcomings of its
results in changed times. What has been said merely makes clear the fact
that the characters, minds, and dispositions of Maria Addolorata and of
her aunt, the abbess, were wholly unsuited to one another. And this one
fact became a source of life and death, of happiness and misery, of
comedy and tragedy, to many individuals, even to the present day.

The nun remained motionless, pressing her cheek against the door-post
and looking out. Her aunt had not quite shut the door by which she had
entered, and a cool stream of air blew outward from the corridor and
through the cell, bringing with it that peculiar odour which belongs to
all large and old buildings inhabited by religious communities. It is
made up of the cold exhalations from stone walls and paved floors in
which there is always some dampness, of the acrid smell of the heavy,
leathern, wadded curtains which shut off the main drafts of air, as the
swinging doors do in a mine, of a faint but perceptible suggestion of
incense which penetrates the whole building from the church or the
chapel, and, not least, of the fumes from the cookery of the great
quantities of vegetables which are the staple food of the brethren or
the sisters. It is as imperceptible to the monks a