This is not the only time by any means that Catherine had to meet similar complaints. Wherever she bore her strong vitality, limitless sympathy and peculiar charm, new friends gathered around her and clung to her with an unreasoning devotion that cried out in exacting hunger for her presence, and often proved to her a real distress. For Catherine, swiftly responsive as she was to individual affections, perfect in loyalty as she always showed herself, moved, nevertheless, in a region where unswerving service of a larger duty might at any moment force her to refuse to gratify, at least in outward ways, the personal claim. This was very hard for her friends to understand; one is sorry for them. At the same time, one feels more than a little pathos in her efforts to bring these simpler minds into understanding sympathy with that high sense of vocation which underlay all her doings: "Know, dearest mother, that I, your poor little daughter, am not put on earth for anything else than this; to this my Creator has chosen me. I know you are content that I should obey Him." But Monna Lapa never was quite content--not to the very end. TO MONNA LAPA HER MOTHER AND TO MONNA CECCA IN THE MONASTERY OF SAINT AGNES AT MONTEPULCIANO, WHEN SHE WAS AT ROCCA In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary: Dearest mother and daughter in Christ sweet Jesus: I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His precious Blood: with desire to see you so clothed in the flames of divine charity that you may bear all pain and torment, hunger and thirst, persecution and injury, derision, outrage and insult, and everything else, with true patience; learning from the Lamb suffering and slain, who ran with such burning love to the shameful death of the Cross. Do you then keep in companionship with sweetest Mother Mary, who, in order that the holy disciples might seek the honour of God and the salvation of souls, following the footsteps of her sweet Son, consents that they should leave her presence, although she loved them supremely: and she stays as if alone, a guest and a pilgrim. And the disciples, who loved her beyond measure, yet leave her joyously, enduring every grief for the honour of God, and go out among tyrants, enduring many persecutions. And if you ask them: "Why do you carry yourselves so joyously, and you are going away from Mary?" they would reply: "Because we have lost ourselves, and are enamoured of the honour of God and the salvation of souls." Well, dearest mother and daughter, I want you to do just so. If up to now you have not been, I want you to be now, kindled in the fire of divine charity, seeking always the honour of God and the salvation of souls. Otherwise you would fall into the greatest grief and tribulation, and would drag me down into them. Know, dearest mother, that I, your poor little daughter, am not put on earth for anything else; to this my Creator has elected me. I know you