Having received Saint Amulfia as assistant nurse, Sister Jeanne constantly scolded her for her clumsy carelessness. Saint Amulfia, indeed, had spent so great a part of her time in conversation either with God or with Satan, and had grown so absent-minded, that she was completely incapable of giving a patient a spoonful of medicine, or a cup of beef-tea, without spilling them all over the bed!
At last, from a novice, Saint Amulfia became a full-blown nun, and from this time onward called Christ her “Celestial Husband.” The visions continued, and the conversations became so grotesque that Irene, on reading them, sometimes quite involuntarily burst into peals of laughter. She always, however, immediately and reproachfully stopped herself, thinking in horror:
“How dare I? What am I doing? She was a _Saint_!”
With every page, however, Irene’s perplexity grew. What if there were similar saints among the Sœurs Mauve? What if (God forbid!) she herself should become a saint? Irene tried to console herself with the thought that all this had taken place in the seventeenth century, in days of ignorance and mental darkness—on the other hand, however, she remembered that that had been the century of Corneille, Molière, Racine, the brilliant Madame de Sévigné, the golden age, indeed, of French literature. Beyond this, the entire arrangement of life in a Catholic Convent was new to her, and surprised her exceedingly. She had imagined a refuge for women who had been disappointed in life, and who longed for a quiet harbour where they would be sheltered from the storms of the world, and where, safely anchored at last, they could end their days in holiness and prayer. She had imagined the relations of the nuns to each other, as polite and friendly, much like those of well-bred people staying in the same hotel, and meeting each other every day at dinner. In reality there appeared to be a severe régime, by which she, Irene, would be obliged to submit in every way to the will of her Superior, who might be a trivial-minded, common person, capable of forcing her subordinates to spend their time in performing such “sacrifices” or “great deeds” as eating something they did not like, or occupying themselves with something useless that could not interest them.
