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