hrough the
mass except at the gospels, left part of his neck and face undried so
that air might sting them and, whenever he was not saying his beads,
carried his arms stiffly at his sides like a runner and never in his
pockets or clasped behind him.

He had no temptations to sin mortally. It surprised him however to find
that at the end of his course of intricate piety and self-restraint he
was so easily at the mercy of childish and unworthy imperfections. His
prayers and fasts availed him little for the suppression of anger at
hearing his mother sneeze or at being disturbed in his devotions. It
needed an immense effort of his will to master the impulse which urged
him to give outlet to such irritation. Images of the outbursts of
trivial anger which he had often noted among his masters, their
twitching mouths, close-shut lips and flushed cheeks, recurred to his
memory, discouraging him, for all his practice of humility, by the
comparison. To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was
harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant
failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at
last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts
and scruples. His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the
sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dried-up sources. His
confession became a channel for the escape of scrupulous and unrepented
imperfections. His actual reception of the eucharist did not bring him
the same dissolving moments of virginal self-surrender as did those
spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit
to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was
an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading
characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love
and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading
of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with
the communicant's prayers. An inaudible voice seemed to caress the
soul, telling her names and glories, bidding her arise as for espousal
and come away, bidding her look forth, a spouse, from Amana and from
the mountains of the leopards; and the soul seemed to answer with the
same inaudible voice, surrendering herself: INTER UBERA MEA
COMMORABITUR.

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that
he felt his soul beset once again by the insisten