But the most distinguished of the matrons who frequented the chapel on the Aventine was Paula, a descendant of Scipio and the Gracchi on one side, and, it was claimed, of Agamemnon on the other. The Romans did not stop at myths or probabilities in their genealogies, and her husband traced his ancestry to Æneas. But it is certain that Paula belonged to the oldest and noblest family in Rome. She had an immense fortune, and had passed her life in the fashionable circles of her time. A widow at thirty-three, with five children, and inconsolable, she suddenly laid aside the personal insignia of her rank, exchanged cloth of gold for a nun’s robe, silken couches for the bare ground, gaiety for prayers, and the costly pleasures of the sybarite for days and nights of weeping over the most trivial faults, imaginary or real. Even the stern St. Jerome begged her to limit her austerities; but she said that she must disfigure a face she had been so wicked as to paint, afflict a body which had tasted so much delight, and expiate her laughter with her tears. She dressed and lived as poorly as the lowest of her servants, and expressed a wish to be buried as a beggar. Full of a sweet and tender humanity, however, she was no less pitiful to others than severe to herself. Of her four daughters, Eustochium, a serious girl of sixteen, sympathized most with her ascetic views and was closely associated with her life-work. She was the first patrician maiden to take the vow of perpetual virginity. But the flower of the family was her sister Blæsilla, “older in nature, but inferior in vocation,” said St. Jerome. Beautiful, gay, clever, young, and a widow after seven months of marriage, she loved things of the world and had small taste for the austerities of her mother. She found time for study, however, as she spoke Greek fluently and learned Hebrew so rapidly that she bade fair to equal Paula, who liked to sing the psalms of David in the rugged and majestic language in which they were written. But a violent fever turned her thoughts from mundane vanities to a life of asceticism. No more long days before the mirror, no more decking of her pretty little person. She put on the brown gown like the others, and devoted her brilliant youth to the same service. But so excessive were her penances, so rigorous her fastings, and so severe her austerities, that she died of them at twenty, asking God to pardon her because she could not carry out her plans of devotion and self-sacrifice. Her funeral was hardly in keeping with these plans. All the world did honor to the beautiful, accomplished woman who had forsaken a life of elegant ease for the hardships of a self-imposed poverty. They covered her coffin with cloth of gold, and the most distinguished men in Rome marched at the head of the cortège. Her untimely death brought an outburst of indignation against the mother who had encouraged a self-denial so hard and unnatural. But this mother had fainted as she followed her idolized