ignor Saracinesca. He is a real saint, if
there is one living.'

CHAPTER VII

There is a religious house in Rome, beyond the Tiber and not far from
Porta Portese, which I will call the Convent of the White Sisters of
Santa Giovanna d'Aza. Their order is a branch of a great and ancient
one, though it has not had a separate existence a very long time. The
convent contains one of the best private hospitals in Italy, and the
Sisters also go out as trained nurses, like those of several other
orders. But they do something more, which the others do not; for
almost every year two or three, or even four of them go out to the Far
East to work in the leper hospitals which missionaries have
established in Rangoon and elsewhere; and a good many have gone in the
last ten years, but few will ever return.

The convent is much larger than any one would suppose who judged
merely from the uninteresting stuccoed wall which faces the quiet
street, and in which there are a few plain windows without shutters
and a large wooden door, painted a dull green. This door, which is the
main entrance, is opened and shut by the portress as often as a
hundred times a day and more; but when it is open there is nothing to
be seen within but a dark vestibule paved with flagstones; and the
portress's wooden face is no more prepossessing than the wall itself.
If any one asks her a question, she answers civilly in a businesslike
tone, with a hard foreign accent, for she is the widow of one of the
Swiss Guards at the Vatican; but she is naturally silent, stolid,
mechanical, and trustworthy. She is a lay sister and is called Sister
Anna, and she lives in a small room on the left of the vestibule, as
you go in, five steps above the stone pavement. She is very rarely
relieved from her duties for a few hours at a time, and all the
patients must pass her when they enter or leave the house, as well as
the doctors, and the visitors whose smart carriages and motor cars
often stand waiting in the narrow street. Fifty times a day, perhaps,
the door-bell rings and Sister Anna deliberately flaps down the five
steps in her heavily-soled slippers to admit one person or another,
and fifty times, again, she flaps down to let them out again. The
reason why she does not go mad or become an imbecile is that she is
Swiss. That, at least, is how it strikes the celebrated surgeon,
Professor Pieri, who is at the convent very often because he has many
of his patients brou