"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 $5.00 a week as trained librarians. So back again. Well, education as the world hands it out to us is a mighty expensive thing. You give so much of your heart's blood and get so little back in any tangible form, but 'youth shows but half' and we have not yet come to the harvesting years. We might as well sow hopes and plans and ambitions generously 'and stretch through time a hand to reap the far-off interest of tears'."
And she said of the number 19 in her life, in the late fall of 1918:
"I was thinking a lot about life this morning, coming home from church. You know the 27th of November is Mother's anniversary…. Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, always a great Catholic Feast … Father's birthday was the 23rd of December, he was buried on Christmas day—their wedding anniversary was December 3lst— my birthday is January first, J—'s the seventh, Mother's the fifth. So the whole season is full of memories, churches, masses, prayers, associations. And it struck me as strange that this New Year's finishes another half of my life. I was nineteen that winter. This year I shall be just twice that. Nineteen years were all childhood, dreaming, planning, hoping, aspiring, but with no practical care, no responsibilities of any sort, the most sheltered existence a girl could have. And now nineteen of as varied an experience as most people know, teaching, housekeeping, bringing up the younger children, seven years of Paul Elder's, the settlement house, travel, London, Rome, Paris, New York, the two convents in Chicago and London, extreme poverty, self-support, comfortable, moderate means, as you and I had, luxury such as this and the months with E—, six years a wife, five years a mother when J—'s birthday rounds it out,—the earthquake, which we thought transcended in size and importance anything that would ever happen to us, and then our little share of the tragedy of the war. Nineteen full years, n'est-ce pas? And now we start a new life, thank God, together."
She wrote me earlier, in 1917, while I was waiting to be called to a
Southern training camp:
"I plan a home some day of the most Spartan simplicity, all our needs cut down to the lowest and plainest of possessions, and yet a spirit of hospitality, of contentment, of gaiety, of self-reliance and mutual helpfulness. Books and bookshelves…"
And of the Army:
"It so often makes me think of the religious orders. The combination of the most heroic impulses with the most commonplace drudgery. The extraordinary fluctuations of feeling, thinking at one time that it is the only thing in the world to do … and then the feeling, what am I doing this for, anyway, other people do not find it necessary… As one nun said to me, 'You do not have to accept a Carmelite vocation— but, you have to either accept or refuse it.' The choice is laid before everyone, but once it is, all the coward has to do is to stand aside."