By Agnes Repplier
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IN OUR CONVENT DAYS
IN OUR
CONVENT DAYS
BY
AGNES REPPLIER, Litt.D.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1905
COPYRIGHT 1905 BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October 1905
To “Elizabeth” Robins Pennell
Julius Cæsar
Introduction
It has been many years since Iwent to school. Everything haschanged in the Convent that Iloved, and I am asked to believe thatevery change is for the better. I donot believe this at all. I am unmovedby the sight of steam registers andelectric lights. I look with disfavourupon luxuries which would haveseemed to us like the opulence ofAladdin’s palace. I cannot wax enthusiasticover the intrusion of Mr.Matthew Arnold and Mr. Pater uponthe library shelves, where Chambers’Miscellany used to be our nearestapproach to the intellectual. The oldorder changes, and that unlovely word,modernity, is heard within the tranquilconvent walls. Even the ironhand of discipline has been relaxed;[Pg viii]for the long line of girls whom I nowwatch filing sedately in and out of thechapel have been taught to rule themselves,to use their wider liberty withdiscretion. I wonder how they likeit. I wonder if liberty, coupled withdiscretion, is worth having when oneis eleven years old. I wonder if it bethe part of wisdom to be wise sosoon.
The friends whom I loved are scatteredfar and wide. When Tony died,she took with her the soun