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