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Show Anting Alone Page 293 and doctors and local politicians and all the other paternalistic personages whom nuns are supposed to worship. And, yet, along with her seemingly preternatural capacity for something that could only be called brute force of will, Pudentiana had also possessed a delicately diplomatic touch. She'd insinuated herself and her community into the wills of several rich old Colorado Springs dowagers - while unctuous Bopp here had only succeeded in depleting the coffers during his tenure at Saint Paphnutius, to the point where the sisters were now obliged to sell off bits of the proud grounds, which Pudentiana herself had provided them, simply in order to survive the coming winter. It wouldn't do for such a woman in all her glory to be released in the imaginations of nuns whose only function it was to serve Bopp his oatmeal, would it? No. Better present her as a cardboard moron with magical powers of prestidigitation - a potential saint, in other words. Polycarpana was certain that Bopp's constantly referring to her grave as a shrine was not a mere Freudian slip (which is what he claimed, with a smirk, each of the ten or twelve times per day he said the word) , but rather a calculated bit of not-so-subliminal prodding, an attempt to introduce an informal Cult of Revised, Sterilized, Cutesified Pudentiana. Next he'd probably want to dig up her corpse, to inspect it for signs of uncorruption. No. Not even Bopp would go that far. Such an institutionalization of a pure, Arabesque sexism, such a well-organized program for the indoctrination of same, no matter how desperately ridiculed by rebel nuns like Simone Stylite in the privacy of the cloister, could only have a stifling, sickening, killing effect on a woman. And |