“O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with the cords of Thy love.”

“Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet consummation of Thy love.”

“O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true, serene, most holy, apostolic charity; that my soul may ever languish and melt with entire love and longing for Thee.  Let it desire Thee and faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee.”

“Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels.”

“Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better than wine.  Draw me, we will run after Thee.  The king hath brought me into his chambers....  Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy presence.  May it taste how sweet Thou art....  May the sweet and burning power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul.”

To my dear mother this type of religious thought was revolting.  But then, she was a woman who had been a wife and a devoted one, while I was a child awaking into womanhood, with emotions and passions dawning and not understood, emotions and passions which craved satisfaction, and found it in this “Ideal Man”.  Thousands of girls in England are to-day in exactly this mental phase, and it is a phase full of danger.  In America it is avoided by a frank, open, unsentimental companionship between boys and girls, between young men and young women.  In England, where this wisely free comradeship is regarded as “improper”, the perfectly harmless and natural sexual feeling is either dwarfed or forced, and so we have “prudishness” and “fastness”.  The sweeter and more loving natures become prudes; the more shallow as well as the more high-spirited and merry natures become flirts.  Often, as in my own case, the merry side finds its satisfaction in amusements that demand active physical exercise, while the loving side finds its joy in religious expansion, in which the idealised figure of Jesus becomes the object of passion, and the life of the nun becomes the ideal life, as being dedicated to that one devotion.  To the girl, of course, this devotion is all that is most holy, most noble, most pure.  But analysing it now, after it has long been a thing of the past, I cannot but regard it as a mere natural outlet for the dawning feelings of womanhood, certain to be the more intense and earnest as the nature is deep and loving.