t. Help me!
Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel
I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has
come....

"I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up.
I do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately hard to say. I am
full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour
about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is
a soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me
help! Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I
can keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see
it now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you--and you
preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday I said
to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart,
decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all
my jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I
decided I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just
simple and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd
of me, too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not
want you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how
resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never
mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new church.

"I think you ought to have some place near the centre of London; not too
west, for you might easily become fashionable, not too east because you
might easily be swallowed up in merely philanthropic work, but somewhere
between the two. There must be vacant sites still to be got round about
Kingsway. And there we must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very
simple, very beautifully proportioned building in which you can
give your message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do
something of the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet solemn
and serious. Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live somewhere in
the north-west of London--but she would tell me very little. I seem to
see you not there at all, not in anything between west-end and suburb,
but yourself as central as your mind, in a kind of clergy house that
will be part of the building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All
that though can be settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is
running away with me. It is no t