Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog Read Online Free

cathedral.”
    “Did you spill them deliberately? To create a commotion in the cathedral? Confess.” Mitrofanii glanced into her eyes, but then he felt ashamed, because the response he read in them was meek reproach. “All right, all right, I didn’t mean that…but that is not the point of my fable; you have guessed wrong. What is it about the way we human beings are constituted that makes us think every event that occurs and every word that is spoken center on ourselves? That is pride, my daughter. And you are too small a bird for me to go concocting fables about you.”
    Feeling suddenly annoyed, he rose, put his hands behind his back, and paced up and down the library.
    The bishop’s library, to which it is probably worth our while to pay some attention, was maintained in perfect order under the management of his secretary, Userdov, a most assiduous worker. The bookcase with the works on theology and patrology was located at the center of the longest of the walls (the one that had no windows or doors). It contained doctrinal compositions in Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek, and ancient Hebrew. Extending to its left were the bookcases of hagiography, with lives of the saints, both Orthodox and Roman Catholic; to the right were works on ecclesiastic history, liturgics, and canonics. A separate place was accorded to a broad bookcase with tracts on asceticism, a reminder of His Grace’s former enthusiasm. The same bookcase also contained extremely precious bibliographical rarities such as a first edition of Saint Teresa Avila’s The Internal Castle and Reisbruck the Amazing’s Robes of the Spiritual Marriage. Lying on a long table running the entire length of the room were bound files of Russian and foreign newspapers and magazines, among which pride of place was given to The Zavolzhsk Diocesan Gazette, a provincial newspaper that the bishop himself edited.
    Non-religious literature of the most various kinds, from mathematics to numismatics and from botany to mechanics, stood on the stout oak shelves that completely covered the surface of the other three walls of the library. The only kind of reading that the reverend bishop avoided and considered of little value was fiction. He used to say that the Heavenly Creator had contrived more than enough miracles, mysteries, and unique stories in this world, so there was no point in mere mortals inventing their own worlds peopled with puppets; besides, anything contrary to God’s own inventions would certainly be wretched and fail to delight. Sister Pelagia argued this point with the bishop, claiming that since the Lord had implanted the desire to create in the soul of man, He was the best judge of whether there was any sense and benefit in the writing of novels. However, this theological dispute was not initiated by Mitrofanii and his spiritual daughter and it will not conclude with them, either.
    Halting in front of Pelagia, who was waiting meekly for her spiritual teacher’s rather incomprehensible irritation to subside, Mitrofanii suddenly asked: “Why is your nose shiny? Have you been bleaching your freckles with elixir of dandelion again? Is that the right sort of thing for a bride of Christ to concern herself with? You are an intelligent woman, after all. And as the blessed Diadochus teaches us: ‘She who adorns her flesh is guilty of love of the body, which is the sign of disbelief.’”
    From his jesting tone of voice, Pelagia realized that the cloud had blown over, and she replied spryly: “Your Diadochus, my lord, is a well-known obscurantist. He even forbids us to wash. How does he put it in his Love of Virtue ? ‘It is best, for the sake of abstinence, to avoid the bathhouse, for our body is weakened by its sweet wetness.’”
    Mitrofanii knitted his brows.
    “I’ll have you make a hundred bows to the ground for speaking so disrespectfully of an ancient martyr. And his teaching on the adornment of the flesh is correct.”
    Embarrassed, Pelagia launched into