April 13. Busy this week with the Lenten services. The _tenebrae_ and _miserere_ very fine, the ceremony of washing the altar and displaying St. Veronica’s handkerchief and other relics impressive and beautiful. Somehow it is all arranging itself in my mind. At first I felt only dismay and bewilderment, now I begin to see the _raison d’être_. It’s not particularly Christian, but the symbolism is aesthetic and spiritual, a turning from mere material toil and contemplating the unseen and unknown. It’s a sort of theism that seems well suited to the Latins. Hardly a day passes without my going into St. Peter’s or to the Vatican. I take refuge there when too many “oxen come about me, fat bulls of Bashan compass me on every side”! CHAPTER XIX A YEAR OF TRAVEL During our long residence in Rome I made frequent flying trips to America to see my mother. On one of these visits my friends, Captain and Mrs. George Hamilton Perkins, asked me to take their daughter Isabel back with me to Europe. Of the many conversations I had with the parents of this adored only child, one phrase alone hangs in my memory. The gallant Captain said to me in a voice strangely moved with feeling, “I want my little girl to grow up to be a noble woman.” My letters for the next year tell the story of our travels. I strove to do for my young charge what my mother had done for me nearly twenty years before; above all, I tried to help her live up to her father’s ideal. [To my Mother.]