"My Lord Prior said. Mother, in his last charge, that a convent ought to be a little heaven. If that be so, why should we not talk now?" Mother Gaillarde's laugh positively frightened me. It was the hardest, driest, most metallic sound I ever heard. "Sister Annora, you must be a baby! You have lived in a convent nearly fifty years, and you ask if it be a little heaven!" "I cry you mercy, Mother. I asked if it should not be so." "That's another matter," said she, with a second laugh, but it did not startle me like the first. "We should all be perfect, of course. Pity we aren't!" As she worked away at the plums she was stoning without saying either yes or no, I ventured to repeat my question. "You may do as you are told!" was Mother Gaillarde's answer. "Can't you let things alone?" Snappishly as she spoke, yet--I hardly know why,--I did not feel the appeal to her as hopeless as to Mother Ada. To entreat the latter was like beseeching a stone wall. Mother Gaillarde's very peevishness (if I dare call it so) showed that she was a woman, and not an image. "Mother Gaillarde," I said, suddenly--for something seemed to bid me speak out--"be not angry with me, I pray you. I am afraid of letting things alone. My heart seems to be like a dry bough, and my soul withering up, and I want to keep them alive and warm. Surely death is not perfection!" I was going on, but something which I saw made me stop suddenly. Two warriors were fighting together in Mother Gaillarde's face. All at once she dropped the knife, and hiding her face in her veil, she sobbed for a minute as if her heart were breaking. Then, all at once, she brushed away her tears and stood up again. "Child!" she said, in a voice very unlike her usual one, "you are too young for your years. Do not think that dried-up hearts are the same thing as no hearts. Women who seem as though they could not love any thing may have loved once too well, and when they awoke from the dream may never have been able to dream again. Ay, thou art right: death is not perfection. Some of us, maybe, are very far off perfection--further than others think us; furthest of all from what we think ourselves. There have been times when I seemed to see for a moment what perfection is--and it was far, far from all we call it here. God forgive us all! Go to the Infirmary: and if any chide thee for being there, say thou earnest in obedience to me." She turned back to her plum-stoning with a resolute face which might have been a mask of iron: and I, after offering lowly thanks, took the way to the Infirmary. I fear I have been unjust to Mother Gaillarde, and I am sorry for it. I seem to see now, that her hard, snappish speeches (for she does snap sometimes) are not from absence of heart, but are simply a veil to hide the heart. Ah me! how little we human creatures know of each others' hidden feelings! But I shall never think Mother Gaillarde without heart again.