“This maddening cheering,” Laura breathed, rolling tormented eyes about her.
A crucifix, a text: _I would lay Pansies at Jesus’ Feet_, two fresh eggs in a blue paper bag, some ends of string, a breviary, and a birch, were the chamber’s individual, if meagre, contents.
“You used _not_ to have that text, Ursula,” Laura observed, her attention arrested by the preparation of a Cinematograph Company on the parapet of the Cathedral.
The Church had much need indeed of Reformation! The Times were incredibly low: A new crusade ... she ruminated, revolted at the sight of an old man holding dizzily to a stone-winged angel, with a wine-flask at his lips.
“Come, dear, won’t you assist me now to mortify my senses?” Sister Ursula cajoled.
“Quite lightly: For I was scourged, by Sister Agnes, but yesterday, with a heavy bunch of keys, head downwards, hanging from a bar.”
“This morning she sent me those pullets’ eggs. I perfectly was touched by her delicate sweet sympathy.”
“I assure you I felt nothing--my spirit had travelled so far,” Sister Ursula replied, turning to throw an interested glance at the street.
It was close now upon the critical hour, and the plaudits of the crowd were becoming more and more uproarious, as “favourites” in Public life, and “celebrities” of all sorts, began to arrive in brisk succession at the allotted door of the Cathedral.
“I could almost envy the fleas in the Cardinal’s vestments,” Sister Ursula declared, overcome by the venal desire to see.
Gazing at the friend upon whom she had counted in some disillusion, Laura quietly left her.
The impulse to witness something of the spectacle outside was, nevertheless, infectious, and recollecting that from the grotto-sepulchre in the garden it was not impossible to attain the convent wall, she determined, moved by some wayward instinct, to do so. Frequently, as a child, had she scaled it, to survey the doings of the city streets beyond--the streets, named by the nuns often “Sinward-ho.” Crossing the cloisters, and through old gates crowned by vast fruit-baskets in stone, she followed, feverishly the ivy-masked bricks of the sheltering wall, and was relieved to reach the grotto without encountering anyone. Surrounded by heavy boskage, it marked a spot where, once, long ago, one of the Sisters, it was said, had received the mystic stigmata.... With a feline effort (her feet supported by the Grotto boulders), it needed but a bound to attain an incomparable post of vantage.
