“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 time yet for premature plans.  Not that I am not planning day and night.  This letter is simply to offer.  I just want to offer.  Here I am and all my worldly goods.  Take me, I pray you.  And not only pray you.  Take me, I demand of you, in the name of God our king.  I have a right to be used.  And you have no right to refuse me.  You have to go on with your message, and it is your duty to take me—­just as you are obliged to step on any steppingstone that lies on your way to do God service....  And so I am waiting.  I shall be waiting—­on thorns.  I know you will take your time and think.  But do not take too much time.  Think of me waiting.

“Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),