Her greatest danger lay in a kind of fatalistic submission, which would have meant permanent disloyalty to her own ideals and convictions, as well as the abandonment of her vocation. She read the letters of Père Didon, whose heroic acceptance of his destiny influenced her in the direction of sinking her individuality. And one cannot understand the exquisite torture of her position unless one realises that her mind had often been made an arena of conflict between the apparently irreconcilable claims of the domestic and the apostolic life. And yet, Father Hyacinth once said to her in Paris, "You are the only woman I have ever met who has reconciled the vocation of a mother with that of an apostle." It may be appropriate to say here that the prayers of both father and mother have been answered in the conversion of their ten children, who have of their own free will consecrated themselves to the service of Christ. Four sons and three daughters are already engaged in active evangelistic work, and have been used of God for the conversion of many souls. To bring the Maréchale back to liberty, God used the voices of nature, of children and of friends. She had always had a poet’s sensitive ear for earth’s thousand voices of praise, and, sitting in a garden on a spring morning, she wrote: "The past, whoever was right or wrong, shall be buried. Let the dead bury their dead. Leave it, and this beautiful spring-tide let us begin again. The crocuses and snowdrops in this lovely garden all say, ’New Resurrection life!’" Her own children’s voices called her back into the thick of the old spiritual battle. "Now for the children," she wrote; "they must all see some salvation work, and they will feel the glow of the heavenly fire. It will warm them, and say something far more than all the Bible lessons in the world." Her eldest daughters, at that time girls of sixteen and fifteen, but with a wisdom far beyond their years, literally pushed her into the war, and if ever she was unable to go they buckled on their armour and took her place. "Mother writes me," says Victoria in her journal, "that Evangeline held a beautiful meeting on Sunday because she herself was too ill to go. Poor mother, it is difficult for her to keep up her courage." This diarist of fifteen thus philosophises on the meaning of her mother’s sorrow. "Everybody can understand why God lets people of the world, the infidels, the self-seekers, the indifferent, suffer. It is to bring them to Himself through disappointments in the world, in themselves, and in others. But why He allows His children that love Him, those whose greatest wish is to serve Him—why He allows them to suffer is a mystery. Perhaps it is to bring them into still closer communion with Himself, so that they may become one with Him—His, body, soul and spirit, without reserve." The Maréchale’s friends helped to bring her back to her predestined work of soul-winning.