What follows is comical. The town council and the cathedral chapter were convulsed at the news. The mayor sent messages about to convoke a grand assembly of the city council to decide what was to be done, and orders to Theresa to leave the house. But she was resolute. Then, when the town council was baffled, the mayor endeavoured to effect a compromise, being much put out at a woman having defied all the city magnates. But she flourished in his face the brief and an authorisation from the bishop, and he returned defeated. The city magnates in high dudgeon appealed to the sovereign, Philip II., and Theresa was obliged also to send a delegate to court to plead her case. The opposition dragged on for a year, but in the end Theresa carried her point. It was not worth the storm in a teacup raised. This was the beginning. Even in Spain it was felt that a change in monastic life was necessary. But reform assumed the direction of recurrence to severe asceticism, a phase as out of date as could well be conceived, and which accordingly flickered for a while, and then expired. Theresa was delighted to enlist some earnest friars in the cause, and they reformed the Carmelite monasteries on the same lines as those she had pursued with the convents. In her own account of how she founded her various establishments, she says:— “I lived five years in the convent of S. Joseph at Avila, after I had founded it; and I think that they were the most quiet years of my life. I there enjoyed the tranquillity and calmness which my soul has often since longed for.... The number in the house was thirteen, a number which I was resolved not to exceed. I was much delighted at living among such pure and holy souls, for all their care was to serve and praise our Lord. His Divine Majesty sent us everything necessary without our asking; and whenever we were in want—and that was seldom—their joy was all the greater. I praised the Lord for giving them such heroic virtue, and especially for endowing them with indifference to what concerned their bodies. I, who was their Superior, never remember to have been troubled with any thought in this matter, because I firmly believed that our Lord would not be wanting to those who had no other wish than how to please Him. With regard to the virtue of obedience, I could mention many things which I here saw in them. One at present recurs to me. One day a few cucumbers were given to us, and we were eating them at our meal. The cucumber that fell to my share was rotten inside. I called one of the sisters, and to prove her obedience, bade her plant it in the garden. She asked if she should plant it upright or sideways; I said ‘sideways,’ and she immediately did so, without the thought occurring to her that it must decay. Her esteem for obedience was so superior to her natural reason, that she acted as if believing that what I ordered was proper.”