Among the most active and zealous of the order of Bethlehem was the
Sister Theresa, the youngest of the band. Youthful as she was, however,
this Sister's heart was no sweet sacrifice of "a flower offered in the
bud;" on the contrary, I am afraid that Sister Theresa had trifled with,
and pinched, and bruised, and trampled the poor budding heart, until she
thought it good for nothing upon earth before she offered it to Heaven.
I fear it was nothing higher than that strange revulsion of feeling,
world-weariness, disappointment, disgust, remorse, fanaticism--either,
any, or all of these, call it what you will, that in past ages and
Catholic countries have filled monasteries with the whilom, gay, worldly
and ambitious; that has sent many a woman in the prime of her beauty and
many a man at the acme of his power into a convent; that transformed the
mighty Emperor Charles V. into a cowled and shrouded monk; the reckless
swashbuckler, Ignatius Loyola, into a holy saint, and the beautiful
Louise de la Valliere into an ascetic nun; which finally metamorphosed
the gayest, maddest, merriest elf that ever danced in the moonlight
into--Sister Theresa.
Poor Jacquelina! for, of course, you can have no doubt that it is of her
we are speaking--she perpetrated her last lugubrious joke on the day
that she was to have made her vows, for when asked what patron saint she
would select by taking that saint's name in religion, she answered--St.
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