Page:Twilight Sleep (Grosset).pdf/380

RV 372 like a light moving from window to window in a long-uninhabited house. The glimpse startled the girl and caught her by the heart. Suddenly something within her broke up. Her lips tightened like a child's, and she felt the tears running down her cheeks.

"Nona! You're not crying?" Pauline was kneeling at her side.

"It's nothing, mother—nothing. Go! Please go!"

"Darling—if I could only see you happy one of these days."

"Happy?"

"Well, I mean like other people. Married—" the mother hastily ventured.

Nona had brushed away her tears. She raised her head and looked straight at Pauline.

"Married? Do you suppose being married would make me happy? I wonder why you should! I don't want to marry—there's nobody in the world I would marry." She continued to stare up at her mother with hard unwavering eyes. "Marry! I'd a thousand times rather go into a convent and have done with it," she exclaimed.

"A convent—Nona! Not a convent?"

Pauline had got to her feet and stood before her daughter with distress and amazement breaking through every fissure of her paint. "I never heard anything so horrible," she said.

Deeper than all her eclectic religiosity, deeper