Madelon only begged to be let off the tragical
ending, which she could not bear, at last always stopping her
ears when the critical moment of the sword, or the wheel, or
the fire approached. She took great interest in the history of
Ste. Therese, especially in the account of her running away in
her childhood, which seemed to her most worthy of imitation--
only, thinks Madelon, she would have taken care not to have
been caught, and brought back again. The subsequent history of
the saint she found less edifying; nothing that savoured of
conventual life found favour in Madelon's eyes in these days;
and indeed her whole faith in saints and legends was rudely
shaken one day by a broad and somewhat reckless assertion on
the part of Soeur Lucie, that all the female saints had been
nuns--an assertion certainly unsupported by the facts, whether
legendary or ascertained, but which had somehow become a fixed
idea in Soeur Lucie's mind, and was dear to the heart of the
little nun.
"They were not nuns like you, then," says Madelon at last,
after some combating of the point, "for they could go out, and
walk about, and do a great many things you must not do--and if
I were a saint, I would never, never become a nun!"
"But it is the nuns that have become saints," cries Soeur
Lucie, with the happiest conviction; and Madelon, unable to
argue out her own ideas on the subject, contented herself with
repeating, that anyhow they had not all been nuns like Soeur
Lucie, which was indisputable.
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