Perpetual Light | Page 3

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 who could have helped greatly. Self-denial, sacrifice, poverty, effort were the watchwords ever recurring to her. Her instant concentration upon any book or paper that came under her eyes became a family joke. She would be lost immediately, oblivious of all surroundings. She read and thought with a lively appreciation of the many futilities in life and a desire