will pay them, for she is easily intimidated. You see, she has
never seen such an enormous town before in her life, nor yet so
many strange people. She has been keeping house for the uncle-
priest in some mountain gorge for years and years. It's
extraordinary he should have let her go. There is something
mysterious there, some reason or other. It's either theology or
Family. The saintly uncle in his wild parish would know nothing of
any other reasons. She wears a rosary at her waist. Directly she
had seen some real money she developed a love of it. If you stay
with me long enough, and I hope you will (I really can't sleep),
you will see her going out to mass at half-past six; but there is
nothing remarkable in her; just a peasant woman of thirty-four or
so. A rustic nun. . . ."

I may as well say at once that we didn't stay as long as that. It
was not that morning that I saw for the first time Therese of the
whispering lips and downcast eyes slipping out to an early mass
from the house of iniquity into the early winter murk of the city
of perdition, in a world steeped in sin. No. It was not on that
morning that I saw Dona Rita's incredible sister with her brown,
dry face, her gliding motion, and her really nun-like dress, with a
black handkerchief enfolding her head tightly, with the two pointed
ends hanging down her back. Yes, nun-like enough. And yet not
altogether. People would have turned round after her if those
dartings out to the half-past six mass hadn't been the only
occasion on which she ventured into the impious streets. She was
frightened of the streets, but in a particular way, not as if of a
danger but as if of a contamination. Yet she didn't fly back to
her mountains because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a
peasant tenacity of purpose, predatory instincts. . . .