There were strange jostlings of ideas in that cloistered cell, especially when the dusk had stolen in between our bending faces and the Spanish page.
Once we talked of suicide. That morning it had been a wealthy young Parisian who had paid its daily tribute to the Seine.
"What a horror!" gasped the little sister, clasping her slender hands against her breast. "It is a mortal sin. And how foolish! For if life is hard to bear, surely perdition is harder."
"It does not seem to me so strange in case of the poor," I responded, waiving theology. "But a rich man, though his own happiness fails, has still the power of making others happy."
"Ah, but I understand!" cried Little Manila, her eyes like stars in the dimness. "The devil does not see truth as the blessed spirits do, but sees falsehoods even as the world. And so in his blindness he believes the soul of a rich man more precious than the souls of the poor, and tempts the rich man more than others. Yet when the devil has that soul, will he find it made of gold?"
One chilly November afternoon, gray with a fog that had utterly swallowed the Eiffel Tower above its first huge uprights, which straddled disconsolately like legs forsaken of their giant, she explained in a sudden rush of words why Spain had been worsted in the war with America.
"Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. As with persons, so with nations. Those that are not of His fold He gives over to their fill of vainglory and greed and power, but the Catholic nations He cleanses again and again in the bitter waters of defeat--ah, in fire and blood! Yet the end is not yet. The rod of His correction is upon Spain at this hour, and the Faithful are glad in the very heart of sorrow, for even so shall her sins be purged away, even so shall her coldness be quickened, even so shall she be made ready for her everlasting recompense."
"And the poor Protestant nations?" I asked, between a smile and a sigh.
The little sister smiled back, but the Catholic eyes, for all their courtly graciousness, were implacable.
She was of a titled family and had passed a petted childhood in Madrid. There she had been taken, on her seventh birthday, to a _corrida de toros_, but remembered it unpleasantly, not because of the torture inflicted on the horses and bulls, but because she had been frightened by the great beasts, with their tossing horns and furious bellowing. Horns always made her think of the devil, she said. From her babyhood she had been afraid of horns.