She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, intellectual, ascetic. At last she thought she had it. On her shelf she found an uncut volume, a present from some one who had never read it, but had bought it because it cost several dollars and would serve as a gift. It was Gardner's biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, “a study in the religion, literature, and history of the fourteenth century of Italy.” That sounded heartless enough. The frontispiece portrait of the wan, meager, despondent saint promised freedom from romantic balderdash. Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. The preface announced the book to be “history centered in the work and personality of one of the most wonderful women that ever lived.” This was the medicine Charity wanted--the story of a woman who had been wonderful without love or marriage. There followed a description of the evil times--and the wicked town in which Caterina Benincasa was born--as long ago as 1347. A pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of the world had come. The word _trench_, the perishing of the people and the apparent end of the world, gave the story a modern sound. It might concern the murderous years of 1914-16. Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. She even wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a boy. Later her sister persuaded her to dye her hair and dress fashionably. Charity began to fear for her saint, but was reassured to find that already at sixteen she was a nun and had commenced that “life of almost incredible austerity,” freeing herself from all dependence on food and sleep and resting on a bare board. Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted herself for three whole years to silence broken only by confessions. How good it would be not to talk to anybody about anything for years and years! How blissful to live a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor but the errands of mercy and of prayer! Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine's idea of God, and her morbid devotion to His blood as the essence of everything beautiful and holy. Charity could not put herself back into that Middle Age when the most concrete materialism was mingled inextricably with the most fantastic symbolism. Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling temptations found even Catherine out even in her cloistral solitude. It frightened Charity to read such a passage as this: