In Our Convent Days

IN OUR CONVENT DAYS - Introduction - IT has been many years since I went to school. Everything has changed in the Convent that I loved, and I am asked to believe that every change is for the better. I do not believe this at all. I am unmoved by the sight of steam registers and electric lights. I look with disfavour upon luxuries which would have seemed to us like the opulence of Aladdins palace. I cannot wax enthusiastic over the intrusion of Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Pater upon the library shelves, where Chambers Miscellany used to be our nearest approach to the intellectual. The old order changes, and that unlovely word, modernity, is heard within the tranquil convent walls. Even the iron hand of discipline has been relaxed vii Introduction for the long line of girls whom I now watch filing sedately in and out of the chap have been taught to rule themselves, to use their wider liberty with discretion. I wonder how they like it. I wonder if liberty, coupled with discretion, is worth having when one is eleven years old. I wonder if it be the part of wisdom to be wise so soon. The friends whom I loved are scattered far and wide. When Tony died, she took with her the sound of laughter into the silent land, and all things have seemed more sober since she left. To those who live, these pages will, I hope, bring back the sentiment of our early days. We made one anothers world then, - a world full of adventures, and imaginings, and sweet absurdities that no one of us would now wish less absurd. Our successors to-day know more than we knew they could not well know . . . less, they V111 Introduction have lectures, and enamelled bathtubs, and Essays in Criticism but ddthey live their lives asvehemently as we lived ours do they hold the secrets of childhood inviolate in their hearts as we held them in ours are they as untainted by the commonplace, as remote from the obvious, as we always were and will they have as vivid a picture of their convent days to look back upon, as the one we look at now . A. R. Contents Marianus The Convent Stage In Retreat Un CongC sans Cloche Marriage Vows Reverend Mothers Feast The Game of Love