I have not been able to succeed in doing so. I have
prayed to God with fervor to take away from me this love, or else to
kill me, and God has not deigned to hear me. I have prayed to the
Virgin Mary to blot your image from my soul, and my prayer has been in
vain. I have made vows to my patron saint to the end that he would
enable me to think of you only as he thought of his blessed spouse, and
my patron saint has not succored me. Seeing all this, I have had the
audacity to ask of Heaven that you would allow yourself to be
vanquished, that you would cease to desire to be a priest, that there
might spring up in your soul a love as profound as that which is in my
heart. Don Luis, tell me frankly, has Heaven been deaf to this last
prayer also? Or is it, perchance, that to subjugate a soul as weak, as
wretched, and as petty as mine, a petty love is sufficient, while to
master yours, protected and guarded as it is by vigorous and lofty
thoughts, a more powerful love than mine is necessary, a love that I am
neither worthy of inspiring, nor capable of sharing, nor even able to
understand?"

"Pepita," returned Don Luis, "it is not that your soul is less than
mine, but that it is free from obligations, and mine is not. The love
you have inspired me with is profound, but my obligations, my vows, the
purpose of my whole life so near to its realization, contend against it.
Why should I not say it without fearing to offend you? If you succeed in
making me love you, you do not humiliate yourself. If I succumb to your
love, I humiliate and abase myself. I leave the Creator for the
creature. I renounce the unwavering purpose of my life, I break the
image of Christ that was in my soul; and the new man, that I had created
in myself at such cost, disappears, that the old man may come to life
again. Instead of my lowering myself to the earth, to the impurity of
the world that I have hitherto despised, why do not you rather elevate
yourself to me by virtue of that very love you entertain for me, freeing
it from every earthly alloy? Why should we not love each other then
without shame, and without sin, and without dishonor? God penetrates
holy souls with the pure and refulgent fire of his love, and fills them
with it, so that, like a metal fresh from the forge, that, without
ceasing to be a metal, shines and glitters and is all fire, these souls
fill themselves with joy, and are in all things God, penetrated by God
in every part, through the