When the kitten was not thus occupied, she was playing with skeins of logic and getting herself terribly tangled.
She put her difficulties to her favourite nun as they walked in the quaint arcades of the lovely old garden, and their talk was punctuated by the flippant click of croquet-balls in the courtyard beyond.
"Madame Agathe is pleased with me to-day," said Eileen. "To-morrow she will be displeased. But how can I help the colour of my soul any more than the colour of my hair?"
"Hush, my child; if you talk like that you will lose your faith. Nobody is pleased or vexed with anybody for the colour of their hair."
"Yes, where I come from a peasant girl suffers a little for having red hair. Also a man with a hump, he cannot marry unless he owns many pigs."
"Eileen! Who has put such dreadful thoughts into your head?"
"That is what I ask myself, ma mere. Many things are done to me and I sit in the centre looking on, like the weathercock on our castle at home, who sees himself turning this way and that way and can only creak."
"A weathercock is dead-you are alive."
"Not at night, ma mere. At home in my bedroom I used to put out my candle every night by clapping the extinguisher upon it. Who is it puts the extinguisher upon me?"
The good sister almost wished it could be she.
But she replied gently, "It is God who gives us sleep-we can't be always awake."
"Then I am not responsible for my dreams anyhow?"
"I hope you don't have bad dreams," said the nun, affrighted.
"Oh, I dream-what do I not dream? Sometimes I fly-oh, so high, and all the people look up at me, they marvel. But I laugh and kiss my hand to them down there."
"Well, there's no harm in flying," said the nun. "The angels fly."
"Oh, but I am not always an angel in my dreams. Is it God who sends these bad dreams, too?"
"No-that is the devil."
"Then it is sometimes he who puts the extinguisher on?"
"That is when you have not said your prayers properly."
Eileen opened wide eyes of protest. "Oh, but, dear mother, I always say my prayers properly."
"You think so? That is already a sin in you-the sin of spiritual pride."
"But, ma mere, devil-dreams or angel-dreams-it is always the same in the morning. Every morning one finds oneself ready on the pillow, like a clock that has been wound up. One did not make the works."
"But one can keep them clean."
Eileen burst into a peal of laughter.
"Qu'avez-vous donc?" said the good creature in vexation.
"I thought of a clock washing its face with its hands."
"You are a naughty child-one cannot talk seriously to you."
"Oh, dear mother, I am just as serious when I am laughing as when I am crying."
"My child, we must never cultivate the mocking spirit. Leave me. I am vexed with you."
As her first communion approached, however, all these simmerings of scepticism and revolt died down into the recommended recueillement. Her days of retreat, passed in holy exercises, were an ecstasy of absorption into the divine, and the pious readings began to assume a truer complexion as the experiences of sister-souls, deep crying unto deep. Oh, how she yearned to take the vows, to leave the trivial distracting life of the outer world for the peace of self-sacrificial love!
As she sat in the chapel, all white muslin and white veil, her hair braided under a little cap, the new rosary of amethyst-a gift from home-at her side, her hands clasped, exalted by incense and flowers and the sweet voices of the choir, chanting Gounod's Canticle, "Le Ciel a visite la terre," she felt that never more would she let this celestial visitant go. When after the communion she pulled the last piece of veiling over her face, she felt that it was for ever between her and the crude world of sense; the "Hymn of Thanksgiving" was the apt expression of her emotions.
But next time she came under these aesthetic, devotional influences-even as her own voice was soaring heavenward in the choir-she thought to herself, "How delicious to have an emotion which you feel will last for ever and which you know won't!" And a gleam of amusement flitted over her rapt features.
III.
When Eileen returned to the Convent after her first summer vacation in Ireland she was richer by a surreptitious correspondent. He wrote to her, care of Marcelle, who had a careless mother. He was a young officer from the neighbouring barracks who, invited to make merry with the hospitable O'Keeffe, had fallen a victim to Eileen's girlish charms and mature appearance, for Eileen carried herself as if her years were three more and her inches six higher. Her face had the winsome Irish sweetness; it, too, looked lovelier than a scientific survey would have determined. Her nose was straightish, her mouth small, her lashes were long and dark and conspired with her dark hair to trick a casual observer into thinking her eyes dark, but they were grey with little flecks of golden light if you looked closelier than you should. Her hands were large but finely shaped, with long fingers somewhat turned back at the tips, and pretty pink nails-the hands were especially noticeable, because even when Eileen was not playing the pianoforte, she was prone to extend her thumb as though stretching an octave and to flick it as though striking a note.
It was not love-letters, though, that Lieutenant Doherty sent Eileen, for the schoolgirl had always taken him in a motherly way, and indeed signed herself "Your Mother-Confessor." But the mystery and difficulty of smuggling the letters to and fro lent colour to the drab Convent days, far vivider colour than the whilom passing of verses. So long as Marcelle's desk remained next to Eileen's it was comparatively easy-though still risky-while one's head was studiously buried in "Greek roots," for one's automatic hand to pass or receive the letter beneath the desks through the dangerous space of daylight between the two. "Let not your right hand know what your left hand doeth," Eileen once quoted when Marcelle's conscience pricked. For Marcelle imagined an amour of the darkest dye, and could not understand Eileen's calmness any more than Eileen could understand Marcelle's romantic palpitations alternating with suggestive sniggerings.
But when Marcelle was at length separated from Eileen by a suspicious management, a much more breathless plan was necessary. For Marcelle would deposit the Doherty letter in Eileen's compartment in the curtained row of little niches-where one kept one's work-bag, atlas, and other educational reserves-or Eileen would slip the reply into Marcelle's, and there it would lie, exposed to inspectorial ransacking, till such times as Eileen or Marcelle could transfer it to her bosom. Poor Marcelle lived with her heart in her mouth, trembling, at every rustle of the curtain, for her purple ribbon. However, luck favoured the bold, while the only bad moment in which Eileen was on the verge of detection she surmounted by a stroke of genius.