In Which we learn about the pains of Humility; and Innocence leaves Religious devotion and we rediscover the virtues of Chastity.
When Sister Innocence had returned from Brook to her own Convent she was to find that Sister Charity's bed in her room had been taken by a new nun, Sister Humility, who seemed to take the literal meaning of her Christian name very seriously indeed. In fact, the first time Innocence met Sister Humility she was knelt down on the floor with her robe pulled forward over her shoulders and crouched on her feet, showing her bare back and her buttocks. She was looking at Sisters Faith and Hope who were, unusually, making love to each other without the cover of their bedsheets.
This was odd, Innocence thought. Perhaps Sister Humility had a similar desire to masturbate as Sister Charity and a need for voyeurism to intensify her feelings. However, her innocent interpretation was soon disproved when with a sudden crack she saw Sister Humility's hand pop up followed by a length of cord which slapped against her back leaving a small trail of blood. Sister Humility was beating herself.
When Sister Humility and the other two nuns noticed Sister Innocence they greeted her, and politely finished what they were doing. Sister Humility sat down on her bed, with her robe still gathered up to her neck at the back but covering the whole of her body at the front. For a woman who seemed to enjoy self-abuse she had a curiously child-like face with open blue eyes and a tiny nose. Sister Faith sat behind Sister Humility and tended to the fresh wounds that she had which were lost on a back full of scars from previous beatings which stretched from her neck to the top of her thighs. The scars were at their deepest and most frequent between the shoulders and on her buttocks.
Sister Innocence learnt that her new room-mate believed passionately in mortification of the flesh as being the means towards salvation. As a result of daily punishing her sinful lusts, she would purify her soul such that at the Rapture the Lord's semen would arrive in her uncontaminated by other lusts. She had persuaded Sisters Faith and Hope, who cheerfully admitted an initial reluctance, to help her in her self-mortification by emulating the lust that she wished to ban from herself and which she believed she would beat out of her. "You can see," she admitted pointing to the many scars on her back, "that my thoughts have been less than pure and have required a great deal of humbling."
Innocence resisted pleas by her room-mates that she either help Sister Humility in purging herself of her sinful carnal desires by emulating masturbation or sex or purge herself of such sins by similar self-mortification to that of Sister Humility. In fact, now that Sister Charity had gone she felt curiously lonely in the Convent. She realised now how much she'd needed Sister Charity's friendship.
So, when she heard she had a visitor she at first thought and hoped that it might be Sister Charity returning from Brook. This, she admitted to herself, was unlikely as Sister Charity had seemed almost deliriously happy in her new home when they parted with a chaste kiss on the lips. She had made many new friends - many of whom shared her belief in the rightness of masturbating to thoughts of Christ's ultimate entry into their body and soul. In Brook, Sister Charity's views were not at all eccentric.
Her visitor was in fact Kedi who Innocence hadn't seen since she'd left Alice's home. She was dressed more demurely than Innocence had ever seen her before - no doubt as a mark of respect for being in a Convent. However, the white cloth over her breasts and around her crotch didn't detract at all from the beauty of her otherwise naked body. She sat waiting on a chair in the reception room with her legs crossed and swinging her bare feet nonchalantly back and forth. She grinned widely as Innocence came in and sat nervously opposite her.
Kedi explained that she had come to visit Innocence partly on the bidding of Chastity who was wondering how her sister was doing. She and Chastity were living together at a house they were renting in Wonderground near where Mouse and her parents lived, but she had been visiting some friends in Brook and had stopped at the Convent as it was en route.
"I thought you'd still be living with Alice and Dinah," commented Innocence.
"Well, Alice was very jealous and possessive, was she not?" remarked Kedi. "And it was very difficult when you and Chastity have left because Alice started to get upset when Mouse began to sleep with me. I thought I ought not to cause any more problems and when Chastity has come to visit me and said we can live together I didn't refuse."
"How is Chastity?"
"Your sister seems very happy. Much happier than when we have been together at Alice's. She says she is very much in love with me. In fact she says she has never loved anyone as much as she loves me now. But she says she loves you very much. And she is very much thinking of you now. Are you happy?"
Innocence nodded, but she felt that perhaps she didn't express quite as much conviction as she might have done. Kedi gazed sympathetically into Innocence's eyes and her grin took on a slightly sadder tinge.
"Do you think you like to be a nun? I have been very surprised when I had been told you become a nun. It must be strange for you."
"Why strange?"
"With your special gift," Kedi said without embarrassment. "And the life you and Chastity have led together: it has not been life like many nuns. Are you not supposed to be a virgin?"
"I am a virgin!"
"Perhaps," said Kedi diplomatically. "But Chastity thinks that you must find it more difficult as one who has known what it is like not to be a virgin or not very like one and to be a nun. Are you sure you are happy?"
