Perpetual Light | Page 3

$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."
This last illustrates how she always saw the necessities of those she
loved in terms of the spirit. Napoleon is reported to have said of Jesus
Christ: "He speaks from the soul as never man spoke; the soul is
sufficient for him, as he is sufficient for the soul."
So she thought. And her letters contain many quotations she formed her
life by:
"God himself is Truth, Charity, and Purity, and the three things he hates
most are deceit, cruelty, and impurity."
"God make us all saints!"
And the characteristic ending of a letter, with her full name always
signed, such as:
"Lord, grant us in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to
come life everlasting.
TERESA."
But it is impossible to convey what her ways were with the children
and in the several homes that she made so full of dreaming light. She
had a keen appreciation of the humorousness and quaintness of children.
She was always quoting to me their adventures, their sayings. She had
countless plans and schemes for work in the world, and carried out
many of them in relation to woman suffrage, baby clinics, camp-fire
organization for the girls of our village, and, during the war, work with
all the local organizations among women that it called into being where
she was living at the time. She wanted to start a home in America for
French widows and orphans, though this plan was not possible,--she
was deeply interested in the work for the protection of young girls
under Miss Katharine Bement Davis, and only circumstances prevented
her taking this up during the fall of 1918. She had several interviews
with Miss Davis and showed herself to be the very person