s genius, and
Evelyn asked the Reverend Mother if it were not strange that a woman
like Jeanne had never inspired some great literary work.

"I spoke just now of Hamlet, Don Quixote, but Falstaff himself is not
more real than Jeanne, and her words are always so wonderful,
wonderful as Joan of Arc's. When the old woman used to hide their
food under the bed-clothes and sell it for food for the pigs,
leaving the Little Sisters almost starving, Jeanne used to say,
'So-and-so has not been as nice as usual this afternoon.' How is it,
Mother, that no great writer has ever given us a portrait of Jeanne?"

"Well, Jeanne, my dear Evelyn, has given us her own portrait. What
can a writer add to what Nature has given? No one has ever yet given
a portrait of a great saint, of St. Teresa--what can any one tell us
that we do not already know?"

"St. Teresa's life passed in thought, whereas Jeanne's passed in
action."

"Don't be afraid, Evelyn," the Prioress said, "to say what you mean,
that perhaps the way of the Little Sisters of the Poor is a better
way than ours."

"It seems so, Mother, doesn't it?"

"It is permissible to have doubts on such a subject--which is the
better course, mercy or prayer? We have all had our doubts on this
subject, and it is the weakness of our intelligences that causes
these doubts to arise."

"How is that, Mother?"

"It is easy to realise the beauty of the relief of material
suffering. The flesh is always with us, and we realise so easily
that it suffers that there are times when relief of suffering seems
to us the only good. But in truth bread and prayer are as necessary
to man, one as the other. You have never heard the story of the
foundation of our Order? It will not appeal to the animal sympathies
as readily as the foundation of the Sisters of the Poor, but I don't
think it is less human." And the Reverend Mother told how in Lyons a
sudden craving for God had occurred in a time of extraordinary
prosperity. Three young women had suddenly wearied of the pleasure
that wealth brought them, and had without intercommunication decided
that the value of life was in foregoing it, that is to say,
foregoing what they had always been taught to consider as life; and
this story reaching as it did to the core of Evelyn's own story, was
listened to by her with great interest, and she heard in the quiet
of the Reverend Mother's large room, in which the silence when the
canaries were not shrilling was inten