What she set herself to study at the Trinità de' Monti was the secret of devotion. She made notes of the Lady Superior's exhortations; of the spiritual exercises which were enjoined upon novices; of the forms and discipline of self-examination. She sought to extract the secret, and to apply it to the inculcation of the highest kind of service to man as the service of God. For many years the thought in her mind was to be the foundation of some distinctive order or sisterhood; and though in the end she came to be glad that she had not done this, she never abandoned the high ideal which was behind her thought. Nor, though in some ways and in some cases she came to be disillusioned about nursing sisterhoods, did she ever cease to speak with admiration of what she had seen and learnt in some of them. She thought more often, and with more affectionate remembrance, about the spirit of the best Catholic sisterhoods than of Kaiserswerth, or indeed of anything else in her professional experience.
