seemed suddenly a place to flee from; she hadn’t realised that it would be like this....  But it would never do for her to miss Mass, and she sat on the edge of the bed, unable to think of any solution of her difficulties.  The only glass in the room was about a foot square; it had been placed on the chest of drawers, and nothing seemed to Evelyn more inefficient than this wretched glass.  Its very position on the top of the chest of drawers was vexatious.  She could not even get it into the proper angle, and when she removed the piece of paper that held it in position, it swung round and its back confronted her.  That morning it seemed as if she could not dress herself.  Her hair had curled itself into many a knot; she nearly broke the comb, and her hand dropped by her side, and then she laughed outright, having caught sight of some part of her dejection.  As she hooked on her skirt she reflected on the necessity of not leaving bottles of scent nor too many sponges for the observation of the nuns; and the nightgown she had brought was certainly not a conventual garment.

She hurried downstairs, and was just in time to see the nuns coming into church.  They came in by a side door, walking two by two, and Evelyn was again struck by the beauty and mystery of this grey procession.  She had seen on the stage the outward show of men who had renounced the world—­the pilgrims in “Tannhaeuser,” the knights in “Parsifal,” but this was no outward show.  The women she was now witnessing had renounced the world; the life she was witnessing was the life they lived from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year.  She had included lovers amid their renunciations; such inclusion was ridiculous, for of such sins as hers they had not even dreamed.  To pass through life without knowing life!  To have renounced, to have refused love, friends, art, everything, dinner-parties, conversations, all the distractions which we believe make life endurable, to have refused these things from the beginning—­not even to have been tempted to taste, not even to have desired to put life to the test of a fugitive personal experience, but to have divined from the first, by instinct, by the grace of God, the worthlessness of life—­that was what was so wonderful.  Mother Philippa, that simple nun, had done this, instinct had led her—­there was no other explanation.  She had arrived at the same conclusion as the wisest of the philosophers and without any soul-searching, by instinct—­each of the humble lay sisters, the little porteress had done this.  And Evelyn was filled with shame when she thought of the effort it had cost her to free herself from a life of sin.

In extraordinary beauty of grey habit and veil and solemn procession, the nuns passed to their seats.  Now they were kneeling altarwise, and Evelyn was still occupied by the thought that this was not outward show as she had often seen it on the stage, but the thing itself.  This was not acting, this was truth, the truth of all their lifetimes.