Plays were the great diversions of our school life. We had two or three of them every winter, presented, it seemed to me, with dazzling splendour, and acted with passionate fire. I looked forward to these performances with joyful excitement, I listened, steeped in delight, I dreamed of them afterwards for weeks. The big girls who played in them, and of whom I knew little but their names, were to me beings of a remote and exalted nature. The dramas themselves were composed with a view to our especial needs, or rather to our especial limitations. Their salient feature was the absence of courtship and of love. It was part of the convent system to ignore the master passion, to assume that it did not exist, to banish from our work and from our play any reference to the power that moves the world. The histories we studied skipped chastely on from reign to reign, keeping always at bay this riotous intruder. The books we read were as free as possible from any taint of infection. The poems we recited were as serene and cold as Teneriffe. "Love in the drama," says an acrimonious critic, "plays rather a heavy part." It played no part at all in ours, and I am disposed to look back now upon its enforced absence as an agreeable elimination. The students of St. Omer--so I have been told--presented a French version of "Romeo and Juliet," with all the love scenes left out. This _tour de force_ was beyond our scope; but "She Stoops to Conquer," shorn of its double courtship, made a vivacious bit of comedy, and a translation of "Le Malade Imaginaire"--expurgated to attenuation--was the most successful farce of the season. Of course the expurgation was not done by us. We knew Goldsmith and Molière only in their convent setting, where, it is safe to say, they would never have known themselves. Most of our plays, however, were original productions, written by some one of the nuns whose talents chanced to be of a dramatic order. They were, as a rule, tragic in character, and devout in sentiment,--sometimes so exceedingly devout as to resemble religious homilies rather than the legitimate drama. A conversation held in Purgatory, which gave to three imprisoned souls an opportunity to tell one another at great length, and with shameless egotism, the faults and failings of their lives, was not--to our way of thinking--a play. We listened unmoved to the disclosures of these garrulous spirits, who had not sinned deeply enough to make their revelations interesting. It was like going to confession on a large and liberal scale. The martyrdom of St. Philomena was nearly as dull, though the saint's defiance of the tyrant Symphronius--"persecutor of the innocent, slayer of the righteous, despot whose knell has even this hour rung"--lent a transient gleam of emotion; and the angel who visited her in prison--and who had great difficulty getting his wings through the narrow prison door--was, to my eyes at least, a vision of celestial beauty.