On coming out of church, she was told that in half-an-hour her breakfast would be ready in the parlour, and to loosen the mental tension—­she had thought and felt a great deal in the last hour—­she asked the lay sister who were the nuns who sang in the choir.  The lay sister answered her perfunctorily.  Evelyn could see that she was not open at that moment to conversation.  She guessed that the sister had work to attend to, and was not surprised that she did not come back to take the things away.  Although only just begun, the day had already begun to seem long.  She proposed to herself some pious reading; and wondered how she was going to get through the day.  She would have liked to go into the garden; but she did not know the rules of the convent, and feared to transgress them.  However, she was free to go to her room.  The books she had brought with her would help her to get through the morning.

Berlioz’s Memoirs I The faded voices she had heard that morning singing dreary hymns were more wonderful than his orchestral dreams.  Nor did she find the spiritual stimulus she needed in Pater’s Imaginary Portraits.  Some moody souls reflecting with no undue haste, without undue desire to arrive at any definite opinion concerning certain artistic problems, did not appeal to her.  She put the book aside, fearing that she was in no humour for reading that morning; and with little hope of being interested, she took up another book.  The size of the volume and the disproportion of the type seemed to drag her to it, and the title was a sort of prophetic echo of the interest she was to find in the book.  Her thoughts clouded in a sense of delight as she read; she followed as a child follows a butterfly, until the fluttering colour disappears in the sky.  And before she was aware of any idea, the harmony of the gentle prose captivated her, and she sat down, holding in her heart the certitude that she was going to be enchanted.  The book procured for her the delicious sensualism of reading things at once new and old.  It seemed to her that she was reading things that she had known always, but which she had somehow neglected to think out for herself.  The book seemed like her inner self suddenly made clear.  All that the author said on the value of Silence was so true.  She raised her eyes from the page to think.  She seemed to understand something, but she could not tell what it was.  The object of every soul is to unite itself to another soul, to be absorbed in another, to find life and happiness in another; the desire of unison is the deepest instinct in man.  But how little, the author asked, do words help us to understand?  We talk and talk, and nothing is really said; the conversation falls, we walk side by side, our eyes fixed on the quiet skies, and lo! our souls come together and are united in their immortal destiny.  She again raised her eyes from the page—­now she understood, and she thought a long while.  The chapter entitled