Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/251

 

On the day that Eugenia Beatrice was sixteen her aunt took her dressed all in black to enter the convent. They kissed each other good-by coldly, since the aunt had no affection for her and the child had long ago ceased to look for any affection from the world. The door closed and the great ugly girl found herself among the sisters, shrinking and frightened as she had always been in the presence of strangers. They stared at her as intently as if they believed there could be no creature so ugly in all the world.

From that day on her life was given over to pleasing others in the vague half-formed hope that out of her service there would grow some reward of commendation or affection. She scrubbed the floors and swept the vast hallway and took upon herself the meanest tasks, and sometimes there would be a reward, a word of praise from one of the nuns or even the Mother Superior herself. She knelt for long hours on the cold stone floor praying to Saint Francis who had love for all living things and so might love her as well, even if God had made her so ugly that she frightened people. For in the great awkward body there was a soul so hungry for love that it would have given itself over to torture and slavery for the sake of anyone who had for her a kind word. But her ugliness was so great that the other sisters, almost without knowing it, thought of her as something grotesque and strange and different from themselves.

For three years she lived thus and at last when