She had youth, and youth's hunger of
life, and not even the repressive conditions in which she had
been reared had succeeded in extinguishing her high spirit or in
concealing from her the fact that she was beautiful. On the
threshold of that convent which by her dread uncle's will was to
be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have beheld
the inscription, "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate!" she
made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to
bear witness that she did not go of her own free will.
But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip's
was, under God's, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to
soften the sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he
accounted due to one of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty
accorded her certain privileges unusual to members of religious
communities: he granted her a little civil list--two ladies-in-
waiting and two grooms--and conferred upon her the title of
Excellency, which she still retained even when after her hurried
novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted
where to have striven would have been to have spent herself in
vain; but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected
body moved mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go
to make up the grey monotone of conventual existence; in which
one day is as another day, one hour as another hour; in which the
seasons of the year lose their significance; in which time has no
purpose save for its subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping
and waking, to eating and fasting, to praying and contemplating,
until life loses all purpose and object, and sterilizes itself
into preparation for death.
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