Ay, I never knew woman like her in that. There are many that will say prayers, and there are some that will pray, which is another thing from saying prayers: but never saw I one like her, that seemed to do all her work and to live all her living in the very light of the Throne of God. Just as an impassioned musician turns every thing into music, and a true painter longs to paint every lovely thing he sees, so with her all things turn to Jesu Christ. I should think she will be canonised some day. I am sure she deserves it better than many an one whom I have heard man name as meriting to be a saint. Perhaps it is possible to be a saint and not be canonised. Must man not have been a saint before he can be declared one? I know the Lady Julian would chide me for saying that, and bid me remember that the Church only can declare man to be saint. But I wonder myself if the Lord never makes saints, without waiting for the Church to do it for Him. The Church may never call my Lady "Saint Joan," but that will she be whether she be so-called or no. And at times I think, too, that they who shall be privileged to dwell in Heaven will find there a great company of saints of whom they never heard, and perchance some of them that sit highest there will not be those most accounted of in the Calendar and on festival days. But I do not suppose--as an ancestress of my mother did, in a chronicle she wrote which I once read; it is in the possession of her French relatives, and was written by the Lady Elaine de Lusignan, daughter of Geoffroy Count de la Marche, who was a son of that House [Note 5]--I do not suppose that the saints who were nobles in this world will sit nearest the Throne, and those who were peasants furthest off. Nay, I think it will be another order of nobility that will obtain there. Those who have served our Lord the best, and done the most for their fellow-men, these I think will be the nobles of that world. For does not our Lord say Himself that the first shall be last there, and the last first? And I can guess that Joan de Mortimer, my Lady and mother, will not stand low on that list. It is true, she was a Countess in this life; but it was little to her comfort; and she was beside that early orphaned, and a cruelly ill-used wife and a bereaved mother. Life brought her little good: Heaven will bring her more. But I wonder where one Agnes de Hastings will stand in that company. Nay, rather, will she be there at all? It would be well that I should think about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Note 1. A word which then included uniform and all lands of official garb. Note 2. On August 3rd she left Skipton, arriving at Pomfret on the 5th. Note 3. I find no indication of the date: only that she was at Ludlow on October 26, 1330.