“Cannot we say of a soul to whom God extends this solicitude and these delicacies of love that the soul has made for our Lord a bed of roses and lilies, and that it is impossible that this adorable Master will not come, though he may delay, and take his delight with her.”

This saint, in whom religion was genius, was one of Ulick’s most unqualified admirations.  He never spoke of her that his voice did not acquire an accent of conviction, or without alluding to the line of an old English poet, who had addressed her: 

  ‘Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires.’

She recalled with a smile his contempt of the Austins and the Eliots, those most materialistic writers, he would say, whose interest in humanity and whose knowledge of it is limited to social habits and customs.  But St. Teresa he placed among the highest writers, among the great visionaries.  “Her desire sings,” he said, “like the sea and the winds, and it breaks like fire about God’s feet.”  He had said that the soul that flashed from her pages was more intense than any soul in Shakespeare or Balzac.  “They had created many, she but one incomparable soul—­her own, and in surging drift of vehement aspiration, and in recession of temporal things we hear the singing of the stars, the beating of the eternal pulse.”

On Friday she had finished the autobiography, and before going into the garden she took down another of the saint’s works, The Way of Perfection, intending to look through it in some sunny corner.

She had slipped easily into the early hours of the convent.  After breakfast she had the morning to herself, and she divided it between the library and the garden.  The leaves were beginning to fall, and in the thinning branches there seemed to be an appearance of spring.  From St. Peter’s walk she strolled into the orchard, and then into the piece of uncultivated ground at the end of it.  Some of the original furze bushes remained, and among these a streamlet trickled through the long grasses, and following it she found that it led her to the fish pond in the shrubbery, at the back of St. Peter’s walk.  There was there a pleasant, shady place, where she could sit and read.  She stood for a moment watching the fish.  They were so tame that they would take the bread from the novices’ hands.  She had brought some bread, but she had to throw it to them.  She divided it amongst them, not forgetting to favour the little ones, and she thought it strange that they could distinguish her from the novices.  That much they knew of the upper air.  The fish watched her out of their beady eyes, stirring in their dim atmosphere with a strange, finny motion.