They were good, religious women; but they craved retirement, and not action, for the satisfying of their spiritual needs. Otherwise they would have joined some other sisterhood in which noble lives are spent in deeds of charity and love. But there are angels of wrath, angels of mercy, and mere angels. These were mere angels. The possibility of being chosen by the Mother Superior to go out into the world again and take charge of the education, health, and morals of twenty sturdy and squalid little female orphans lived an abiding terror in their gentle breasts. A shipwrecked crew casting lots for the next occupant of the kettle could suffer no greater pangs of apprehension than did the Sisters of Saint Martha on the imminence of an appointment to the orphanage. They had taken vows of obedience. The Mother Superior's selection was final. The unfortunate nominee had to pack up her slender belongings and go to Willesden. Being a faulty human being (and none but a faulty, unpractical, unsympathetic human being can want, in these days of enlightenment, to shut herself up in a nunnery for the rest of her life, with the avowed intention of never doing a hand's turn for any one of God's creatures until the day of her death), she invariably regarded herself as a holy martyr and ruled the poor little devils of orphans for the greater glory of God (magnified entirely, be it understood, by her own martyrdom) than for the greater happiness of the poor little devils. Sister Theophila--in entering into religion the Protestant Sisters changed the names by which they were known in the world, according to the time-honoured tradition of an alien church--Sister Theophila, with the temperament of the recluse, had been thrust into this position of responsibility against her will. She performed her duties with scrupulous exactitude and pious resignation. Her ideal of life was the ascetic, and to this ideal the twenty orphans had to conform. She did not love the orphans. Her staff consisted of one matron, a married woman of a much humbler class than her own. Possibly she might have loved the orphans had she not seen such a succession of them, and her own work been less harassing. Twenty female London orphans from disreputable homes are a tough handful. When you insist on their conformity with the ascetic ideal, they become tougher. They will not allow themselves to be loved. “And ungrateful!” exclaimed the matron, one day when she was taking Risca round the institution. He had expressed to Sister Theophila his desire to visit it, and she, finding him entirely unsympathetic, had handed him over to her subordinate. “None of them know what gratitude is. As soon as they get out of here, they forget everything that has been done for them; and as for coming back to pay their respects, or writing a letter even, they never think of it.”