They were a simple, kind,
good-hearted set, these Sisters, having their little disputes,
and contentions, and jealousies among themselves occasionally,
no doubt, but leading good, peaceable lives on the whole, with
each day and hour well filled with its appointed tasks,
leading through a continual, not useless round of embroidery,
teaching, compote-making, and prayers.
Perhaps some one looking round on them, with their honest,
homely Belgian faces, would have tried to imagine some history
for them, in accordance with the traditions that cling about
convent walls, and associate themselves with the very mention
of a nun; and most likely they would have been all wrong. None
of these Sisters had had very eventful lives, and they had,
for the most part, dropped into their present mode of
existence quite naturally. With little romance to look back
upon, save such as finds a place in even the homeliest life,
with an imperfect middle-class education that had failed to
elevate the mind, or give it wide conceptions of life, and
religion, and duty, a certain satisfaction at having done with
secular life and its cares, and at having their future here
and hereafter comfortably provided for, was perhaps the
general tone amongst this prosaic, unimaginative community.
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