eat a prayer; and in this way her mental eye had formed the habit
of closing to anything that might shake her faith as quickly as the
physical eye closes at a threatened blow. Then, as she was of a poetic
and ideal nature, entirely differing from the mass of those with whom
she associated, she had formed that habit of abstraction and mental
reverie which prevented her hearing or perceiving the true sense of a
great deal that went on around her. The conversations that commonly
were carried on in her presence had for her so little interest that
she scarcely heard them. The world in which she moved was a glorified
world,--wherein, to be sure, the forms of every-day life appeared,
but appeared as different from what they were in reality as the old
mouldering daylight view of Rome is from the warm translucent glory of
its evening transfiguration.

So in her quiet, silent heart she nursed this beautiful hope of finding
in Rome the earthly image of her Saviour's home above, of finding in the
head of the Church the real image of her Redeemer,--the friend to whom
the poorest and lowliest may pour out their souls with as much freedom
as the highest and noblest. The spiritual directors who had formed the
mind of Agnes in her early days had been persons in the same manner
taught to move in an ideal world of faith. The Mother Theresa had never
seen the realities of life, and supposed the Church on earth to be all
that the fondest visions of human longing could paint it. The hard,
energetic, prose experience of old Jocunda, and the downright way with
which she sometimes spoke of things as a trooper's wife must have seen
them, were repressed and hushed, down, as the imperfect faith of a
half-reclaimed worldling,--they could not be allowed to awaken her
from the sweetness of so blissful a dream. In like manner, when Lorenzo
Sforza became Father Francesco, he strove with earnest prayer to bury
his gift of individual reason in the same grave with his family name
and worldly experience. As to all that transpired in the real world, he
wrapped himself in a mantle of imperturbable silence; the intrigues of
popes and cardinals, once well known to him, sank away as a forbidden
dream; and by some metaphysical process of imaginative devotion he
enthroned God in the place of the dominant powers, and taught himself to
receive all that came from them in uninquiring submission, as proceeding
from unerring wisdom. Though he had begun his spiritual lif