und, red face of the caretaker's wife grew
smaller and smaller below her, and there was a rumbling of wheels in the
avenue. An idle coachman, drawn by the shouts of the children, had
turned the corner to see what was to be seen. And Sister Ursula climbed
in agony of spirit, the heelless black cloth shoes that nuns wear
slipping on the rungs of the ladder, and all earth reeling a hundred
thousand feet below.

She passed one set of apartments, and they were empty of people, but the
fire, the books on the table, and the child's toy cast on the hearthrug
showed it was deserted only for a minute. Sister Ursula drew breath on
the balcony, and then hurried upwards. There was iron rust red on both
her hands, the front of her gown was speckled with it, and a reflection
in the stately double window showed a stainless stiff fold of her
head-gear battered down over her eye. Her shoe, yes, the mended one, had
burst at the side near the toe in a generous bulge of white stocking.
She climbed on wearily, for the bottle was swinging again, and in her
ears there came unbidden the nursery refrain that she used to sing to
the little sick children in the hospital at Quebec:

"This is the cow with the crumpled horn."

Between earth and heaven, it is said, the soul on its upward journey
must pass the buffeting of many evil spirits. There flashed into Sister
Ursula's mind the remembrance of a picture of a man gazing from the
leads down the side of a house--a wonderful piece of foreshortening
that made one dizzy to see. Where had she seen that picture? Memory,
that works indifferently on earth or in vacuo, told her of a book read
by stealth in her novitiate, such a book as perils body and soul, and
Sister Ursula blushed redder than the brickwork a foot before her nose.
Everything that she had read in or thought about that book raced through
her mind as all his past life does not race through the soul of a
drowning man. It was horrible, most horrible. Then rose a fierce wave
of rage and indignation that she, a sister of irreproachable life and
demeanour (the book had been an indiscretion, long since bitterly
repented of), should be singled out for these humiliating exercises.
There were other nuns of her acquaintance, proud, haughty and
overbearing (her foot slipped here as a reminder against the sin of
hasty judgments, and she felt that it was a small and niggling Justice
that counted offences at such a crisis), and--and thinking too muc