| I felt it all, and came and knelt beside her, | |
| The electric touch solved both our souls together; | |
| Then came the feeling which unmakes, undoes; | |
| Which tears the sealike soul up by the roots, | |
| And lashes it in scorn against the skies. | |
| *** | |
| It is the saddest and the sorest sight, | |
| One's own love weeping. But why call on God? | |
| But that the feeling of the boundless bounds | |
| All feeling; as the welkin does the world; | |
| It is this which ones us with the whole and God. | |
| Then first we wept; then closed and clung together; | |
| And my heart shook this building of my breast | |
| Like a live engine booming up and down: | |
| She fell upon me like a snow-wreath thawing. | |
| Never were bliss and beauty, love and wo, | |
| Ravelled and twined together into madness, | |
| As in that one wild hour to which all else | |
| The past, is but a picture. That alone | |
| Is real, and forever there in front. | |
| *** | |
| ***After that I left her, | |
| And only saw her once again alive.” |
“Mother Saint Perpetua, the superior of the convent,
was a tall woman, of about forty years, dressed in
dark gray serge, with a long rosary hanging at her
girdle; a white mob cap, with a long black veil,
surrounded her thin wan face with its narrow hooded
border. A great number of deep transverse wrinkles
plowed her brow, which resembled yellowish ivory
in color and substance. Her keen and prominent nose
was curved like the hooked beak of a bird of prey;
her black eye was piercing and sagacious; her face
was at once intelligent, firm, and cold.
“For comprehending and managing the material interests of the society, Mother Saint Perpetua could have vied with the shrewdest and most wily lawyer. When women are possessed of what is called business
8*
