What could they do, all these girls and women together, with the twenty-four long hours of every day, without reading or writing, and without the care of children?  Enough:  with their multiplied diurnal prayer periods, with each its chants and ritual of observances,—­with the preparation for meals, and the clearing away thereafter,—­with the care of the chapel, shrine, sacred gifts, drapery, and ornaments,—­with embroidering altar-cloths and making sacred tapers,—­with preparing conserves of rose-leaves and curious spiceries,—­with mixing drugs for the sick,—­with all those mutual offices and services to each other which their relations in one family gave rise to,—­and with divers feminine gossipries and harmless chatterings and cooings, one can conceive that these dove-cots of the Church presented often some of the most tranquil scenes of those convulsive and disturbed periods.

Human nature probably had its varieties there as otherwhere.  There were there the domineering and the weak, the ignorant and the vulgar and the patrician and the princess, and though professedly all brought on the footing of sisterly equality, we are not to suppose any Utopian degree of perfection among them.  The way of pure spirituality was probably, in the convent as well as out, that strait and narrow one which there be few to find.  There, as elsewhere, the devotee who sought to progress faster toward heaven than suited the paces of her fellow—­travellers was reckoned a troublesome enthusiast, till she got far enough in advance to be worshipped as a saint.

Sister Theresa, the abbess of this convent, was the youngest daughter in a princely Neapolitan family, who from her cradle had been destined to the cloister, in order that her brother and sister might inherit more splendid fortunes and form more splendid connections.  She had been sent to this place too early to have much recollection of any other mode of life; and when the time came to take the irrevocable step, she renounced with composure a world she had never known.

Her brother had endowed her with a livre des heures, illuminated with all the wealth of blue and gold and divers colors which the art of those times afforded,—­a work executed by a pupil of the celebrated Fra Angelico; and the possession of this treasure was regarded by her as a far richer inheritance than that princely state of which she knew nothing.  Her neat little cell had a window that looked down on the sea,—­on Capri, with its fantastic grottos,—­on Vesuvius, with its weird daily and nightly changes.  The light that came in from the joint reflection of sea and sky gave a golden and picturesque coloring to the simple and bare furniture, and in sunny weather she often sat there, just as a lizard lies upon a wall, with the simple, warm, delightful sense of living and being amid, scenes of so much beauty.  Of the life that people lived in the outer world, the struggle, the hope, the fear, the vivid joy, the bitter sorrow, Sister Theresa knew nothing.  She could form no judgment and give no advice founded on any such experience.