Half Loaves by Margaret Culkin Banning

The Convent of the Sacred Heart was a curiously cloistral structure, situated in a manner quite unanticipated by its founders, in the spreading outskirts of the city itself. It was old as age went in Carrington -- its wooden turrets and wasteful curves testified to that -- and it had been built at a time when no one dreamed that the fields and pastures and wooded stretches which lay around the convent's site would be filled within thirty years by prosperous looking residences, sleek lawns and neat hedges. But so it was. As the red brick of the convent walls grew tawny brown with age, the city crept up around them and only the great expanse of its own grounds and that five-foot wall remained to keep the peace of the cloister. But the wall was high and the pine trees within it thickly green in both winter and summer, and the convent, growing richer every year as its property increased in value, gave as little recognition as possible to the modernity outside its gates. It had abandoned its huge windmill for modern plumbing, gradually gas had supplanted lamps and electric wiring supplanted gas -- but there the obvious changes stopped. The parlor was still the severe old Victorian parlor of its first furnishing, the study hall still had desks with lid tops and the stone flagging of the corridors was hollowed with the footsteps of thirty-five years. Its shabby permanency gave it peace and aristocracy and this atmosphere was breathed by the nuns themselves, for they, like the place, were cloistered.

There were those among them who had been in the convent precincts for thirty years -- those whose only voyage outside had been the most inconspicuous and hurried progress from one convent to another, when the Order had transferred them. There were those who came from France, where, until the exile of priests and nuns, they had taught the children of the aristocracy in high walled convents like this one; those who had come from England; and those who in the early part of their lives must have been simple American children. But no matter where they had come from, they were bound together by the same experiences and qualities now -- tremendous religious devotion, a gentle love of seclusion and a fine, faint flavor of aristocracy of birth and education, for the order was no common order. It demanded a background of breeding and learning in its novices, and indeed a substantial dowry for them. All this because it devoted itself to the bringing up of ladies and could not risk the wrong kind of instruction for them.