We have
thus been in convents of Ursulines, Poor Clares, Grey Sisters, and
in some of those of the more strictly cloistered Orders. The
procedure was always the same. We were ushered into a beautifully
clean, bare, whitewashed parloir, with a highly polished floor
redolent of beeswax. There would be hard benches running round the
parloir, raised on a platform, much after the fashion of raised
benches in a billiard-room. In the centre would be a chair for the
Reverend Mother. We then made polite conversation for a few
minutes, after which coffee (usually compounded of scorched beans,
with no relation whatever to "Coffea Arabica") was handed to us,
and we went over the convent. It was extremely difficult for two
Protestants to find any subject of conversation which could
interest a Mother Superior who knew nothing of the world outside
her convent walls, nor was it easy to find any common ground on
which to meet her, all religious topics being necessarily
excluded, I had noticed that the nuns made frequent allusions to a
certain Marie Alacoque. Misled by the similarity of the sound in
French, I, in my ignorance, thought that this referred to a method
of cooking eggs.
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