There were hilarious girls, girls staring with large interest at the oddities of this new world while they remarked in provincial French, and girls folding their hands about their crucifixes and looking down. The coquettish had arrayed themselves coquettishly, and the sober had folded their shoulder-collars quite high about their throats.
“But,” dropped Mother Mary into the ear of Madame Bourdon, who stood at the mouth of the matrimonial pen, receiving and placing each squad, “these are mixed goods!” To which frolicsome remark from a strict devotee Madame Bourdon replied with assenting shrug.
The minds of both, however, quite separated the goods on display from one item of the cargo then standing in the convent parlor before the real bishop of Canada. This item was a slim young girl, very high-bred in appearance, richly plain in apparel. She held a long, dull-colored cloak around her with hands so soft and white of flesh that one’s eye traced over and over the flexible curve of wrist and finger. Her eyes were darkly brown, yet they had a tendency towards topaz lights which gave them moments of absolute yellowness; while her hair had a dazzling white quality that the powders of a later period could not impart. Bits of it straying from her high roll of curls suggested a nimbus around the forehead. Her lower face was full, the lips most delicately round. Courage and tears stood forth in her face and encountered the bishop.
François Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, then vicar-apostolic of the province, with the power rather than name of bishop, was a tall noble, priestly through entire length of rusty cassock and height of intellectual temples. He regarded the girl with bloodless patience. He had a large nose, which drooped towards a mouth cut in human granite; his lean, fine hands, wasted by self-abasement and voluntary privations, were smaller than a woman’s. Though not yet forty, he looked old, and his little black skull-cup aged him more. The clear Montmorency eye had in him gained, from asceticism and rigid devotion, a brightness which penetrated.
His young relative’s presence and distress annoyed him. For her soul’s salvation, he would have borne unstinted agony; for any human happiness she craved, he was not prepared to lift a little finger.