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