‘And don’t we? or, rather, don’t they? Ourselves are always excepted, I suppose,’ said Oswald, delighted to have set afloat one of those abstract discussions which young talkers, aware of a pleasant faculty of turning sentences, love. ‘Why should ourselves be excepted?’ said Agnes, forgetting her shyness. ‘Why should it always be supposed that we who speak are better than our neighbours? Oh, I have seen so much of that! people who know only a little, little circle setting down all the rest of the world as wicked. Why? If I am unhappy when anyone I love is in trouble, that is a reason for believing that others are so too; not that others are indifferent----’ ‘Ah,’ said Oswald, ‘to judge the world by yourself would be well for the world, but disappointing for you, I fear. I am an optimist, too; but I would not go so far as that.’ She gave him a sudden look, half-inquiring, half-impatient. ‘One knows more harm of one’s self than one can know of anyone else,’ she said, with the dogmatism of youth. He laughed. ‘I see now why you judge people more leniently than I do. What quantities of harm _I_ must know that _you_ could not believe possible! What is life like, I wonder, up on those snowy heights so near the sky?--a beautiful soft psalm, with just a half-tone wrong here and there to show that it is outside heaven----’ ‘Indeed, indeed, you are mistaken! I--I am not a Sister--you mistake me,’ said Agnes, in agitation. ‘It is only the dress----’ ‘You are doing just what you condemn,’ he said; ‘setting me down as a superficial person able to judge only by the outside. I have superior pretensions. Is my friend Sister Mary Jane the Superior of the convent? But I suppose you don’t call it a convent? I have only known them in France.’ ‘We call it only “the House”; but I have never been in France--never out of England at all. Is it not like going into a different world?’ Agnes took up this subject eagerly, to escape the embarrassment of the other; and fortunately the House itself was already in sight. ‘The very same world, only differently dressed. I suppose there is something harmonious in a uniform. All the nuns have a kind of beauty, not the pensive kind one expects; or perhaps it is the white head-dress and the calm life that give the Sisters such pretty complexions, and such clear eyes. Sister Mary Jane, for instance--you will allow that the Sisters are calm----’