Many were the talks I had with Sister Annunciata as we wandered over the grassy slopes and through the groves and gardens of the convent; and though the unusual circumstances may have appealed strongly to my imagination, certainly converse with woman never filled me with deeper and keener interest. Her vivacious and sympathetic personality and her renunciation of the world seemed so utterly at variance. She would evince the liveliest interest in worldly affairs, and encourage me to tell her of the men and women who are doing the work of the world, of my own personal friends, of my own feelings, of my mundane interests, and she would discuss all these with me, on sufferance as it were, and then remind herself every now and then, by religious allusions, that her life was utterly apart from mine. She would love me to talk of poetry and romance, and, somehow or other, we would generally drift thence to religious mysticisms and the problems of life and death, which she would always solve with the logic of faith, and beg me not to try and prove her wrong. Talking to her was not like talking to other women; she could draw my soul out as by some enchantment, and the poetry of the place and its surroundings seemed to weave a spell about me. In her presence my ordinary life seemed so far away, and I suppose she was quite a woman, but to me she appeared always a kind of dream-woman. I never could quite associate her with her surroundings, and yet I could never imagine her anywhere else. It was so incongruous to think of her bright mind being shut away from society, yet she seemed to belong to that grey stone building and the wooded slopes with the sea beyond. But Sister Annunciata is so different from all the other nuns. Her mental capacity is so much greater that she is not bound by the narrow prejudices of the others, which accounts for her greater sway over the minds and affections of her pupils. But then, perhaps, her Sisters are happier than she is, for all her cheerfulness and her laughter; not that she would ever own that she was not happy, though perhaps she would allow you to use the term “content” in preference. Content she is by reason of her will, and peace she has by reason of her faith and the place; but happiness is not the result of volition, it is an expression of the soul acted upon from without. But Sister Annunciata cannot be happy so easily as the other Sisters, for her soul, being larger and more active, requires more to make it happy; while the Reverend Mother, who has been half a century “in religion,” is as happy as she can imagine it possible to be, so long as she can pray to her heart’s content, and tell her beads in the sunshine. She can conceive no one reading any poetry but that which piously sings the praises of the Saints, and would probably cast up her eyes in horror did she know that Sister Annunciata had ever read Shelley.