“Well, Jeanne, my dear Evelyn, has given us her own portrait.  What can a writer add to what Nature has given?  No one has ever yet given a portrait of a great saint, of St. Teresa—­what can any one tell us that we do not already know?”

“St. Teresa’s life passed in thought, whereas Jeanne’s passed in action.”

“Don’t be afraid, Evelyn,” the Prioress said, “to say what you mean, that perhaps the way of the Little Sisters of the Poor is a better way than ours.”

“It seems so, Mother, doesn’t it?”

“It is permissible to have doubts on such a subject—­which is the better course, mercy or prayer?  We have all had our doubts on this subject, and it is the weakness of our intelligences that causes these doubts to arise.”

“How is that, Mother?”

“It is easy to realise the beauty of the relief of material suffering.  The flesh is always with us, and we realise so easily that it suffers that there are times when relief of suffering seems to us the only good.  But in truth bread and prayer are as necessary to man, one as the other.  You have never heard the story of the foundation of our Order?  It will not appeal to the animal sympathies as readily as the foundation of the Sisters of the Poor, but I don’t think it is less human.”  And the Reverend Mother told how in Lyons a sudden craving for God had occurred in a time of extraordinary prosperity.  Three young women had suddenly wearied of the pleasure that wealth brought them, and had without intercommunication decided that the value of life was in foregoing it, that is to say, foregoing what they had always been taught to consider as life; and this story reaching as it did to the core of Evelyn’s own story, was listened to by her with great interest, and she heard in the quiet of the Reverend Mother’s large room, in which the silence when the canaries were not shrilling was intense, how a sign had been vouchsafed to these three young women, daughters of two bankers and a silk merchant, and how all three had accepted the signs vouchsafed to them and become nuns.

“I am not depreciating the active Orders when I say they are more easily understood by the average man than—­shall I say the Carmelite or any contemplative Order, our own for example.  To relieve suffering makes a ready appeal to his sympathies, but he is incapable of realising what the world would be were it not for our prayers.  It would be a desert.  In truth the active and the contemplative Orders are identical, when we look below the surface.”

“How are they identical, Mother?”

“In this way:  the object of the active Orders is to relieve suffering, but the good they do is not a direct good.  There will always be suffering in the world, the little they relieve is only like a drop taken out of the ocean.  It might even be argued that if you eliminate on one side the growth is greater on the other; by preserving the lives of old people one makes the struggle harder for others.  There is as much suffering in the world now as there was before the Little Sisters began their work—­that is what I mean.”