paying compliments to seculars. "With externs," says St. Catharine of Sienna in a letter to her niece, "you should be modest; your head should be bowed down, and your manner and conversation simple and unaffected." At the grate be careful to abstain from unguarded looks and indecent laughter, and never appear in a habit affectedly neat. It would be a still greater fault to go to the grate with any badge of worldly pomp or vanity.
In a word, if you expect to escape every danger, remove yourself as much as possible from all conversation with seculars. "Sit solitary," says St. Bernard, " as the turtle: have nothing to do with crowds." Remain in solitude; love the choir and the cell, and shun the parlor as the abode of pestilence. To consecrate your whole being to God, you have left the world; what, then, have you to do with seculars? "If," says the Venerable Sister Jane of St. Stephen, of the Order of St. Francis, "you are the spouse of the King of kings, turn not your eyes toward slaves." It is a crime in a slave to fix his eyes on the king's spouse, and should the queen take complacency in his attention to her, she would be guilty of a similar transgression. Speaking of nuns, St. Catharine of Sienna says: "We shall not be spouses but sacrilegious violators of our engagements, if we seek for happiness in the gratification of self-love; if we hate the cell, and love the society of seculars." Should you, in conversation, ever feel a disorderly affection, stifle it at once before it acquires the strength of a giant. "While," says St. Jerome, "the enemy is small, destroy him." To kill a lion when young is an easy task; but to conquer him when he has attained full growth is a work of extreme and insuperable difficulty.
