Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/136

 young painters and made them the fashion. Occasionally it pleased her to put on a simple frock and go among the poor, giving right and left. This amused her, and she said it was better than chloral. "For I'm sometimes afraid," she added, lightly, "that my recording angel is over-worked."

The stories of her transatlantic success interested New York managers, and flattering offers came to her from them each season. For eight years she declined these; she had "broken with America," she said. She had no American correspondents; she did not even read the American newspapers. Why should she return to her native land when in all its length and breadth it held no friends of hers? Even her old bohemian associates had a meagre sense of propriety. She, the defier of all fit human standards, could have nothing in common even with them. But one day a sudden, unaccountable wave of homesickness rolled over her. She felt a strange longing for the sights and sounds of Broadway; for her Western home—strangest of all, an aspiration towards her old convent itself. Her lips curled in self-scorn. She—a visitor at the convent! That the idea should have found a place in her consciousness showed that something was wrong with her. She wondered what it was. She