something remote, partly horrible, wholly unintelligible.

'Why did she do it?' he asked. 'What sort of a girl was she? Do you mind
telling me?'

'Not in the least,' said Maguire. 'Only I'm not sure that I know. Three
years ago--that is, when I left home--she was the last sort of girl you
could imagine going into a convent. She was pretty, fond of nice clothes
and admiration, as keen as every girl ought to be on a dance. I never
supposed she had a thought of religion in her head--I mean, beyond the
usual confessions and attendances at Mass.'

'I suppose,' said Hyacinth, 'your people wanted it.'

'I don't think so,' said Maguire. 'Perhaps my mother did. I don't know.'

'You see, Conneally,' said Tim Halloran, 'it is a sort of hall-mark
of respectability among people like Maguire's to have a girl in a good
convent. A little lower down in the social scale, in the class I come
from, the boys are made priests. A doctor is a more expensive article to
manufacture, so Maguire's father selected that line of life for him. Not
that they could have made a priest of you, Maguire, in any case. You'd
have disgraced Maynooth, as I did.'

'I don't understand,' said Hyacinth. 'I thought a vocation for the life
was necessary.'

'Oh, so it is,' said Tim Halloran, 'but, you see, there's the period of
the novitiate. Given a girl at an impressionable age, the proper convent
atmosphere, and a prize of six hundred pounds for the Order, and it
will go hard with the Reverend Mother if she can't work the girl up to
a vocation. It takes a man a lifetime to make six hundred pounds in
a country shop, but there's many a one who does it by hard work and
self-denial; then down come the nuns and sweep it away, and it's
wasted. It ought to be invested in a local factory or in waterworks, or
gas-works, or fifty other things that would benefit the town it's made
in. It ought to be fructifying and bearing interest; instead of which
off it goes to Munich for stained glass, or to Italy for a marble altar.
Is it any wonder Ireland is crying out with poverty?'

'Yes,' said Maguire, 'and that's not the worst of it. I'd be content to
let them take the damned money and deck their churches with it, but the
girls--there are hundreds of them caught every year for nuns, and swept
out of life. It isn't the Irish convents alone that get them. American
nuns come over and Australian nuns, and they go round and round the
country picking up girls here and there, and