The
first duty of a novice was to be free of preference, to obey without a
sigh of choice. On the third day, however, Sister Ann Frances,
supervising, stopped at the open schoolroom door to hear the junior
female orphans repeating in happy chorus after their instructress the
statement that seven times nine were fifty-six. I think Hilda saw Sister
Ann Frances in the door. That couldn't go on, even in the name of
discipline, and Miss Howe was placed at the disposal of the chief
nursing Sister at the General Hospital next day. Sister Ann Frances was
inclined to defend Hilda's imperfect acquaintance with primary
arithmetic.
"We all have our gifts," she said. "Miss Howe's is not the
multiplication table, but neither is mine stage-acting." At which the
upper lip lengthened further into an upward-curving smile, and the
Sister Superior remarked cautiously that she hoped Miss Howe would
develop one for making bandages, otherwise----
The depth of what was unusual in Hilda's relation with Alicia
Livingstone--perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite the
ordinary feminine liens--seems to me to be sounded in the tacit
acceptance of Hilda's novitiate on its merits that fell between the two
women.
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