She ushered him into a
good-sized room, where three other girls like herself were engaged in
sewing. Sitting at a table with a book, from which she had apparently
been reading to them, was the woman in the nun-like dress whom he had
met before. The walls of the room were of unpainted pinewood, planed to
a satin finish, and adorned with festoons of gray moss such as hangs
from forest boughs. This was tied with knots of red bittersweet berries;
the feathers of sea-birds were also displayed on the walls, and chains
of their delicate-coloured eggs were hanging there. Caius had not
stepped across the threshold before he began to suspect that he had
passed from the region of the real into the ideal.
"She is a romantic-minded woman," he said to himself. "I wonder if she
has much sense, after all?"
Then the woman whom he was thus inwardly criticising rose and came
across the room to meet him. Her perfect gravity, her dignity of
bearing, and her gracious greeting, impressed him in spite of himself.
Pictures that one finds in history and fiction of lady abbesses rose
before his mind; it was thus that he classified her. His opinion as to
the conscious romance of her life altered, for the woman before him was
very real, and he knew in a moment that she had seen and suffered much.
Her eyes were full of suffering and of solicitude; but it did not seem
to him that the suffering and solicitude were in any way connected with
a personal need, for there was also peace upon her face.
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