She was thinking of her own beginnings, more than twenty years ago, and comparing her own ardent nature with what she knew of Angela's: and then, out of her great experience of character, a doubt arose and troubled her strangely, though she opposed it as if it had been a temptation to injustice, or at least to ungenerous thinking.

It was a suspicion that such marvellous calm as this novice showed could not be all real; that there was something not quite explicable about her perfect submission, humility, and obedience; that under the saintly exterior a fire might be smouldering which would break out irresistibly some day, and not for good.
The woman who had been tried doubted the untried novice.

Perhaps it was nothing more than that, and natural enough; but it was very disturbing, because she also felt herself strongly attached to Angela, and to suspect her seemed not only unfair, but disloyal.

Yet it was the bounden duty of the Mother to study the characters of all who lived under her authority and direction, and to forestall their possible shortcomings by a warning, an admonition, or an encouraging word, as the case might be.
She had done what she could, but she was dissatisfied with herself; and at the very moment when Angela was inwardly repeating her stirring words and committing them to memory for her lifetime, the woman who had spoken them was tormented by the thought that she had not said half enough, or still worse, that she had perhaps made a mistake altogether.

For the first time since she had fought her first great battle with herself, she had the sensation of being near a mysterious force of nature which she did not understand; but she had been twenty years younger then, and the present issue was not to depend on her own strength but on another's, and it involved the salvation of another's soul.
It was long before she bent over the columns of figures again, yet she did not reproach herself with having wasted time.