« Un couvent où l’on ne croit en rien »



“A convent – Nona! Not a convent?”
Pauline had got to her feet and stood before her daughter with distress and amazement breaking through every fissure of her paint.
“I never heard anything so horrible,” she said.
Deeper than all her eclectic religiosity, deeper than her pride in receiving the Cardinal, deeper than the superficial contradictions and accommodations of a conscience grown elastic from too much use, Nona watched, with a faint smile, the old Puritan terror of gliding priests and incense and idolatry rise to the surface of her mother’s face. Perhaps that terror was the only solid fibre left in her.
“I sometimes think you want to break my heart, Nona. To tell me this now!... Go into a convent...” the mother groaned.
The girl let her head drop back among the cushions.
“Oh, but I mean a convent where nobody believes in anything,” she said.

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927).