Perpetual Light | Page 2

all in absence from her at various times and in moods made
strange by absence.
And yet this is all I have at present to give in her memory. But I hold
by these because--though they are poor, freakish fragments as far as
any real expression of her is concerned--they were made for her.

It is even harder to express in bald prose a personality that had so many
sides, so many varying strengths, such inner sight and yet such a
forthright splendid intelligence. I have tried once to round it into
periods--and have destroyed the attempt. It is my hope that the sister to
whom she was devoted with an attachment altogether unusual to most
of us will write of her.
If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her. To say that her
girlhood was given up to an intense and whole-souled devotion to the
life of Christ as taught by the Roman Catholic Church will not even
trace the outlines of that great spiritual adventure. But there, in the
word "adventure," is a dim ideograph of what she found in life. Every
day was an adventure to her with the hope of accomplishing something
over and above mere routine and the pursuit of pleasure. And she used
to say to me that her life had simply been a series of experiments into
which she had put her whole heart, and in which she had always failed.
But, of course, she never failed.
She wrote me while I was stationed at Washington:
"I am so very glad of your Sunday experience. I wish that I might have
shared it with you, but I almost did, since we were at Mass there and
walked across that green together.... No one else might be impressed by
it, but you _know_. When I first thought of a convent I was about
sixteen, and I did not go until I was twenty-one. During that time I had
the habit of pretending when I went to sleep that I was lying full-length
in a convent chapel before a dark altar, with its tiny light. When I went
to the Little Sisters, with all its strangeness and homesickness and
wrench away from everything, I was sustained by the knowledge that
our bedroom on the third floor was across a wide hall from a rose
window that looked right down into the Chapel. The dormitory had
windows out into the hall, French fashion, so that when I opened the
one at the head of my bed I was doing just what I had so often planned.
You cannot imagine how personal it seemed to me.
"Then years after when I was in the Carmelite convent in London, it
began to snow. I stood at a window looking out at the snow upon the
roofs, and began to think (as you would have in my place), "Deep on

the convent roofs the snows are sparkling to the moon,"--and suddenly
I realized that it was St. Agnes Eve, and that long ago, when I was
perhaps fifteen or sixteen, I had prayed that I might be a Carmelite nun
in England. It was a thrill. No one else knew it. No one else could
possibly have brought either of those two things about but Jesus Christ,
the same yesterday, today, and forever."
And she wrote me later:
"We will make a go of it together--I have been just where you are
several times in my life. There is no denying that it hurts like the
mischief, but there is something carried away out of it that the people
who don't go through with it do not have. When I came back from the
Little Sisters, after affirming and reaffirming (to strengthen my own
resolution) that I was never coming back, I had to face just the same old
world, and the same streets and people. Then, after the earthquake, I
left Paul Elder's to go out to the settlement in the Mission. I was full of
faith in it, to work among the poor, without the fetters of a convent, to
plan a new way in which Catholic girls could dedicate themselves to
the service of God, using the best of the Protestant and Catholic ideas
both--and in three months I... had handed in a report which criticized
the whole place severely--and my resignation. I do not know now how
much was personal spite on my part and how far I was right. And back
to the same old circle at Paul Elder's, with another bright bubble broken.
Then came the Carmelites, which cost, I think, more than any, and I
remember I so dreaded coming back to New York and facing everyone
that I tried hard to get a position in London where women get