"Margaret! we are professed religious women." [Note 1.]
"Religious women!" she answered. "If thou gild a piece of wood, doth it
become gold? Religious women are not women that wear black and white,
cut in a certain fashion: they are women that set God above all things.
And have I not done that? Have I not laid mine heart upon His altar, a
living sacrifice, because I believed He called me to break that poor
quivering thing in twain? And will He judge me that did His will, to
the best of my power and knowledge, because now and then a human sob
breaks from my woman-heart, by reason that I am not yet an angel, and
that He did not make me a stone? I do not believe it. I will not
believe it. He that gave His own Son to die for man can be no Moloch
delighting in human suffering--caring not how many hearts be crushed so
long as there be flowers upon His altar, how many lives be made desolate
so long as there be choirs to sing antiphons! Annora, it is not God who
does such things, but men."
I was doubtful how to answer, seeing I could not understand what she
meant. I only said--
"Yet God permits men to do them."
"Ay. But He never bids them to make others suffer,--far less to take
pleasure in doing so."
"Margaret," said I, "may I know thy story? I have told thee mine.
Truly, it is not much to tell."
"No," she said, as if dreamily,--"not much: only such an one as will be
told out by the mile rather than the yard, from thousands of convents on
the day when the great doom shall be. Only the story of a crushed
heart--how much does that matter to the fathers of the Order? There be
somewhat too many in these cells for them to take any note of one."