m for doing their Master's work,' said Esclairmonde, 'and
would fain be worthy to follow in their steps.'

'Surely,' said Malcolm, 'there are houses fit for persons of high and
princely birth to live apart from gross contact with the world.'

'There are,' said Esclairmonde; 'but I trust I may be pardoned for saying
that such often seem to me to play at humility when they stickle for
birth and dower with the haughtiest. I never honoured any nuns so much
as the humble Sisters of St. Begga, who never ask for sixteen
quarterings, but only for a tender hand, soft step, pure life, and pious
heart.'

'I deemed,' said Malcolm, 'that heavenly contemplation was the purpose of
convents.'

'Even so, for such as can contemplate like the holy man I have told you
of,' said Esclairmonde; 'but labour hath been greatly laid aside in
convents of late, and I doubt me if it be well, or if their prayers be
the better for it.'

'And so,' said Alice, 'I heard my Lord of Winchester saying how it were
well to suppress the alien priories, and give their wealth to found
colleges like that founded by Bishop Wykeham.'

For in truths the spirit of the age was beginning to set against
monasticism. It was the period when perhaps there was more of license
and less of saintliness than at any other, and when the long continuance
of the Great Schism had so injured Church discipline that the clergy and
ecclesiastics were in the worst state of all, especially the monastic
orders, who owned no superior but the Pope, and between the two rivals
could avoid supervision altogether. Such men as Thomas a Kempis, or the
great Jean Gerson, were rare indeed; and the monasteries had let
themselves lose their missionary character, and become mere large farms,
inhabited by celibate gentlemen and their attendants, or by the
superfluous daughters of the nobles and gentry. Such devotion as led
Esclairmonde to the pure atmosphere of prayer and self-sacrifice had well-
nigh died out, and almost every other lady of the time would have
regarded her release from the vows made for her its her babyhood a happy
escape.

Still less, at a time when no active order of Sisters, save that of the
Beguines in Holland, had been invented, and when no nun ever dreamt of
carrying her charity beyond the quadrangle of her own convent, could any
one be expected to enter into Esclairmonde's admiration and longing for
out-of-door works; but the person whom she had chiefly made her frie