And as these thoughts were passing through his mind, he remembered
hearing his mother say that Annie's sister was thinking of starting
dressmaking in the High Street. 'It would be nice if Eliza were to join
her,' his mother added casually. Eliza laid aside the skirt she was
turning, raised her eyes and stared at mother, as if she were surprised
mother could say anything so stupid. 'I'm going to be a nun,' she said,
and, just as if she didn't wish to answer any questions, went on sewing.
Well might they be surprised, for not one of them suspected Eliza of
religious inclinations. She wasn't more pious than another, and when
they asked her if she were joking, she looked at them as if she thought
the question very stupid, and they didn't ask her any more.

She wasn't more than fifteen at the time, yet she spoke out of her own
mind. At the time they thought she had been thinking on the
matter--considering her future. A child of fifteen doesn't consider, but
a child of fifteen may _know_, and after he had seen the look which
greeted his mother's remarks, and heard Eliza's simple answer, 'I've
decided to be a nun,' he never doubted that what she said was true. From
that day she became for him a different being; and when she told him,
feeling, perhaps, that he sympathized with her more than the others did,
that one day she would be Reverend Mother of the Tinnick Convent, he
felt convinced that she knew what she was saying--how she knew he could
not say.

His childhood had been a slumber, with occasional awakenings or half
awakenings, and Eliza's announcement that she intended to enter the
religious life was the first real awakening; and this awakening first
took the form of an acute interest in Eliza's character, and, persuaded
that she or her prototype had already existed, he searched the lives of