But if this description has seemed tedious, you must know that Angela lived in the convent and worked there for five whole years after Giovanni was lost in Africa; so that it was needful to say something about her surroundings.
An accomplished psychologist would easily fill a volume with the history of Angela's soul from the day on which she learned the bad news till the morning when she made her profession and took the final vows of her order in the little convent church.

But one great objection to psychological analysis in novels seems to be that the writer never gets beyond analysing what he believes that he himself would have felt if placed in the 'situation' he has invented for his hero or heroine.

Thus analysed, Angela Chiaromonte would not have known herself, any more than those who knew her best, such as Madame Bernard and her aunt the Princess, would have recognised her.

I shall not try to 'factorise' the result represented by her state of mind from time to time; still less shall I employ a mathematical process to prove that the ratio of _dx_ to _dy_ is twice _x_, the change in Angela at any moment of her moral growth.
What has happened must be logical, just because it has happened; if we do not understand the logic, that may or may not be the worse for us, but the facts remain.
It is easy, too, to talk of a 'vocation' and to lay down the law regarding it, in order to say that such and such a woman acted wisely in entering a religious order, or that such another made a mistake.
The fact that there is no such law is itself the reason why neither a man nor a woman is permitted nowadays to take permanent vows until after a considerable period of probation, first as a 'postulant' and then as a novice.
For my own part, when Angela Chiaromonte left Madame Bernard's pleasant rooms in Trastevere and went into the convent hospital of Santa Giovanna d'Aza through the green door, I do not believe that she had the very smallest intention of becoming a nun, nor that she felt anything like what devout persons call a 'vocation.' It was not to disappear from the world for ever that she went there, and it was not in order to be alone with her sorrow, though that would have been a natural and human impulse; nor was it because she felt herself drawn to an existence of asceticism and mystic meditation.
The prospect of work was what attracted her.

She was a perfectly healthy-minded girl, and though she might never cease to mourn the man she had loved, it was to be foreseen that in all other respects she might recover entirely from the terrible shock and live out a normal life.