The _Seconde Nonnes Tale_ contains even less of human interest. Cecilia is neither more nor less than the mouthpiece of the Christian religion, and the miracles that she works and the sermons that she preaches leave the reader unmoved. The music of the verse has a charm of its own, and Chaucer's most left-handed work is yet the work of a genius, but a comparison of Cecilia with Constance soon shows the difference between a real woman and an embodied ideal. The miraculous element, which is subordinated to the human interest in the _Man of Lawes Tale_, dominates the whole of the _Seconde Nonnes Tale_, and the inevitable sameness of the various conversions further detracts from its vividness. In Cressida Chaucer had painted a woman of the butterfly type. In the _Canterbury Tales_ he gives us a certain number of actually immoral women, such as Alisoun and May, but he paints no second picture of pretty helpless coquettishness. The heroines of the less savoury tales are coarser in fibre and for the most part lower in the social scale than Calkas' daughter, and their stories are of mere sensuous self-indulgence with none of the charm and poetry which marks the tale of Troilus and Cressida. One character alone recalls Chaucer's earlier heroine. The Prioress is very much what a fourteenth-century Cressida would have been if her friends had placed her in a convent instead of finding her a husband. She has the same daintiness and trimness, the same superficial tender-heartedness. It is difficult to imagine that her sympathy, like Canace's, would take the practical form of applying salves or binding up wounds, but:-- She was so charitable and so pitous, She wolde wepe if that she sawe a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. Her table manners are excellent, and she wears her veil with an air:-- Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was. Her silver brooch, with its _Amor vincit omnia_, betrays a naïve interest in her personal appearance. She is never brought into contact with the more passionate side of life as Cressida is, and her seclusion from the world has given her a touch of primness which combines oddly with her little affectations. The contrast between her worldliness and that of the Monk is complete. He is gross, jovial, self-indulgent; she is delicate, mincing, conventional. Like Cressida she would always follow the line of least resistance, though it would cause her genuine--if but momentary--distress to give pain to anyone. She is too well-bred ever to think for herself, and too innocent and simple-minded not to accept life as it is offered her. She tells her story with real tenderness and feeling, and it is evident that the atmosphere of the cloister in no wise irks her. It is impossible to regard her as a pattern nun, but equally impossible to judge her harshly. Both she and Cressida have something childlike about them, and it seems out of place to try them by the ordinary standards.