"Drink a little more orange-flower water, dear, and never tell me who the man is. I do not wish to hear. I decline to hear."
"That is because you know already, and despise money that is made of jam. Yet coal and beer are swallowed with avidity by young women who have not forfeited the right to be fastidious. That is the last thing I wished to say, but you have wrung it from me. Have you no pride? Do you want Society to say that you have embraced the profession of a Religious, and intend henceforth to employ your talents in teaching sniffy-nosed schoolgirls Greek and Algebra and Mathematics, because this Mildare has jilted you? Again, have you no pride?" She agitated the Britannia-metal teaspoon furiously in the empty tumbler.
Lady Bridget-Mary took the tumbler away. Why should the humble property of the Sisters be broken because this kind, fussy woman chose to upbraid?
"You ask, Have I no pride?" she said. "Why should I have pride when Our Lord is so humble that He does not disdain to take for His bride the woman Richard Mildare has rejected?"
"You are incorrigible, dearest," said the sobbing Dowager-Duchess, as she kissed her, "and Castleclare must use all his influence with the Holy Father to induce the Comtesse de Lutetia to give you the veil. All of you think I am damned, and possibly I may be, but if so I shall be afforded an opportunity (which will not be mine in this life) of giving Captain Mildare a piece of my mind!"
So the Dowager-Duchess melted out of the story, and Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne became a nun.
This is what the Mother-Superior wrote to her kinswoman, with her mobile, eloquent lips folded closely together as she thought, and her grave eyes following the swift journey of the pen as it formed the sentences:
_"Now let me speak to you of Lynette Mildare. I have never thought it necessary to make the slightest disguise of my great partiality for this, the dearest of all the many children given me by Our Lord since I resigned my crown of earthly motherhood to Him."_
She stopped, remembering what another great lady, also a relative of hers, had remarked when it was first made public that she intended to enter the Novitiate:
"Indeed! It would seem, then, that you are devoid of ambition, my dear, unlike the other people of your house."