Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/73

 from them than they dream they are giving. As for the boarders, they have their long vacations at home—and they make the most of them!

All this has really nothing to do with the story, and I do not know why I am writing it, for you understand these things much better than I do. But I think it came to me because I suddenly remembered how we girls used to sit in the garden and talk about Sister Chrysostom, and how we analyzed the difference between her and the other Sisters, and how cheap we used to feel sometimes when she pricked the poor little bubble of our conceit. Please leave that in about the bubble; I think it's rather good, though perhaps I have heard the expression somewhere.

Well, now I must go back a little. You see I don't know how to tell a story—I don't understand what parts to put first. But from this point on I'll tell things as they happened.

One day in January, Sister Chrysostom came into one of the little music-rooms where I was sitting alone, banging away on the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsodic. There were eight of us practising it that week, and we brought tears of anguish to poor Sister Cecilia's eyes. Sister Chrysostom sat down beside me and made as many criticisms as she thought I could bear, and then she leaned back in her