Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/172

 will be one of the black sheep, one of the unpliable, one of those who cannot be utilised to full advantage for the greater glory of God, A. M. D. G.! There never was a more subtle legend invented by man for the pursuit of his own aims under the mantle of self-abnegation.

The convent girl is the creature of her environment. You will know her by the hall-*mark of her manners. These will be perfect when she comes out of The Assumption, or any other Parisian convent of fashionable renown. Wealthy converted Jews, of rabid anti-Semitic tendencies, send their daughters to these famous establishments for the knotting of useful social ties. I have known of the children of a great foreign merchant being accepted in one of these centres of aristocratic exclusiveness, on the condition that they concealed the fact that they belonged to the commercial classes, and the result was that the unfortunate children, with the natural ease of their imaginative years, drifted into glorious bragging and lying. There was no objection on the part of their trainers to any exercise of imagination that served to ennoble them; the objection would have been provoked by betrayal of the truth. It will be said that this is an exceptional example perhaps. Not so. The last thing recognised by nuns is the virtue of poverty, the value of the lowly born. This fact is so widely recognised by women who visit