"They keep their bloom, running about like that; only healthy nuns I
ever saw."

"That's because they have something better than cats to coddle."

"Ah, ha! that's not bad. It's a slow suicide, all the same. But here we
are, at the top; it's a fine outlook, is it not?"

The young man panted as he reached the top of the Maze, one of the
chief glories of the old Abbaye grounds. He had a fair and sensitive
face; a weak product on the whole, he seemed, compared with the
nobly-built, vigorous-bodied nuns crowding the choir-stalls yonder.
Instead of that long, slow suicide, surely these women should be doing
their greater work of reproducing a race. Even an open-air cell seems
to me out of place in our century. It will be entirely out of fashion
in time, doubtless, as the mediaeval cell has gone along with the old
castle life, whose princely mode of doing things made a nunnery the
only respectable hiding-place for the undowered daughters.

As we crept down into Caen, it was to find it thick with the dust of
twilight. The streets were dense with other things besides the
thickened light. The Caen world was crowding homeward; all the
boulevards and side streets were alive with a moving throng of dusty,
noisy, weary holidaymakers. The town was abroad in the streets to hear
the news of the horses, and to learn the history of the betting.

Although we had gone to church instead of doing the races, many of
those who had peopled the gay race-track came back to us. The table
d'hote, at our inn that night, was as noisy as a Parisian cafe. It was