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They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with transepts. It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. Whether the barn had ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained.
Fortunately for Philippa, the Prior of the neighbouring monastery was just despatching his cellarer to London on conventual business: and he undertook to convey her letter to the Savoy Palace, whence it would be forwarded with the next despatches sent to John of Gaunt.
But though the nuns envied the abbess and Maria Addolorata, they did not venture to say so, and they hardly dared to think so, even when they were all alone, each in her cell; for the concentration of conventual life magnifies small spiritual sins in the absence of anything really sinful, and to admit that she even faintly wishes she might be some one else is to tarnish the brightness of the nun's scrupulously polished conscience.
Gollinger's Mechlin cap spreading its conventual shadow over her rebellious brow and the "Revue de Paris" at her elbow turning into a copy of the "Reredos."
He was so reckless that he took this step even without the consent of his parents. "He knew little about the ways of God, and was not well informed of the gravity and responsibilities of the step he was taking." "He was not called by God to conventual life; . . . he was driven by despair, rather than the love of higher perfection, into a religious career."
The liberty of it all, the delicious feeling of freedom, the release from convent rules and convent hours, bells ringing for chapel, bells ringing for meals, bells ringing to mark the end of the brief recreation a perpetual ringing and drilling which had made conventual life a dull machine, working always in the same grooves.
In the nunneries and conventual schools in the United States there is a sort of fairy land, talked about by the nuns to the elder girls. It is called the "Nuns' Island."
I pictured to myself the scene passing within: the poor novice despoiled of her transient finery, and clothed in the conventual garb; the bridal chaplet taken from her brow, and her beautiful head shorn of its long silken tresses. I heard her murmur the irrevocable vow.
The effect of seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls, which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant handle of the bell. "Shall I ring for ye?" said the cabman, who had descended from his perch, and was slapping his chest, for the night was bitter.
The roof and western end of the church were completely ruinous; but the latter appeared to have made one side of a square, of which the ruins of the conventual buildings formed other two, and the gardens a fourth.
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