Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/158

 part of her time was held for them, for home, for friends and social duties. The remainder was her own, to be spent as she pleased and where she pleased. Society did not know as much about her career as it wished, but it heard and saw enough to be highly diverted. It knew that the charming girl in white was equally at home and equally welcome in drawing-rooms and tenements, with box parties and in hospitals, on tally-hos and in prison wards. Sharp contrasts add spice to life, and here were contrasts to satisfy the most exacting. With it all Miss Twombly was fascinating, and full of charms which made many youths sigh hopelessly and long.

"Sister Alice," as they called her—she had no claim to the title, but society gave it and clung to it as a dramatic accessory to the situation—was strangely wanting in sympathy for these young men. Marriage was not a part of the programme she had arranged for herself. She meant to devote her life, she said, to her Work. This was a frequent remark of hers, and as she spoke her face showed that the decision was sincerely made. She was serenely happy; she felt no need of love or companionship other than that given by her own people and the poor. The very suggestion of matrimony, she told her mother, was almost an