This was the lesson that every moment of her convent life impressed upon her.  Her thoughts went back to the Reverend Mother, and Evelyn thought of her as of some woman who had come to some terrible crisis in her worldly life—­some crisis violent as the crisis that had come in her own life.  The Reverend Mother must have perceived, just as she had done, as all must do sooner or later, that life out of the shelter of religion becomes a sort of nightmare, an intolerable torture.  Then she wondered if the Reverend Mother were a widow—­that appeared to her likely.  One who had suffered some great disaster—­that too seemed to her likely.  She had been an ambitious woman.  Was she not so still?  Is a passion ever obliterated?  Is it not rather transformed?  If she had been personally ambitious, she was now ambitious only for her convent:  her passion had taken another direction.  And applying the same reasoning to herself, she seemed to see a future for herself in which her love passions would become transformed and find their complete expressions in the love of God.

The Reverend Mother again addressed her, and Evelyn considered what age she might be.  Between sixty and seventy in point of years, but she seemed so full of intelligence, wisdom and sweetness that she did not suggest age; one did not think of her as an old woman.  Her slight figure still retained its grace, and though a small woman, she suggested a tall one; and the moment she spoke there was the voice which drew you like silk and entangled you as in a soft winding web.  Evelyn smiled a little as she listened, for she was thinking how the Reverend Mother as a young woman must have swayed men.  Presumably at one time it had pleased her to sway men’s passion, or at least it pleased Evelyn’s imagination to think it had.  Not that she thought the Reverend Mother had ever been anything but a good woman, but she had been a woman of the world, and Evelyn attributed no sin to that.  Even the world is not wholly bad; the Reverend Mother and Monsignor owed their personal magnetism to the world.  Without the world they would have been like Father Daly and Mother Philippa—­holy simplicities.  She looked at the quiet nun, and her simple good nature touched her.  Evelyn went toward her.  Sister Mary John broke into the conversation so often that the Reverend Mother had once to check her.

“Sister Mary John, we hope that Miss Innes will sing to-morrow and every day while she is with us.  But she must do as she likes, and these musical questions are not what we are talking about now.”

But Sister Mary John was hardly at all abashed at this reproof.  She was clearly the only one who stood in no awe of the Reverend Mother.