That, in the mind of the religious recluse, cleanliness was not associated with godliness was due to the idea of penance. Washing was regarded as a luxury not to be indulged in excepting at infrequent intervals or by special permission. This idea of ablutions was probably derived at first in reaction from the public baths which were so much in vogue among the Romans, and which were associated in the public mind with luxury, and were often the scenes of conduct quite at variance with the principles for which the nuns stood. The licentiousness which centred around these places brought them into such ill repute that to the ascetic mind washing did not so much signify cleanliness as sin. The virtue of dirt did not extend to the abbesses, who were allowed to wash whenever it was necessary and as frequently as they pleased. By a similar process of deduction, the nuns remained untonsured. In the early times, a woman whose hair was cut short was looked upon as a disreputable character, so that it was repellent to conventional ideas of propriety to conform to the practice of the monks in having the head shaved. The nuns were not always of the most serious disposition and deportment, as is shown by the peculiar enjoinment that they were not to look fixedly on any man, or to romp or frolic with him; neither were they to allow any man to see them unveiled, nor to embrace any man, either an acquaintance or a stranger. The convivial nature of some of the nuns is revealed by an order commanding them not to "use the alehouse or the watercourses where strangers daily resort, or bring in, receive, or take any layman, religious or secular, into the chamber, or any secret place, day or night, or with them in such private places to commune, eat, or drink, without license of your prioress." The monastery which is described by Wriothesley as the most virtuous religious house in England, Sion Monastery, was under an even stricter rule. Conversation with secular persons was permitted only by the license of the abbess from noon to vespers, and only then on Sundays and the great feast days of the saints. Sion Monastery was subjected to the further restriction that the nuns might not receive their friends, but could converse with them by sitting at appointed windows, in the presence of the abbess. If any sister desired to be seen by "her parents or honest friends," she might, by the special permission of the abbess, open the window occasionally during the year; but if she had the self-denial to forego this privilege, a greater reward was assured her in the hereafter.