SO WINNING

"... so winning, so sweetly reasonable as to make her the dearest of friends to all who had the privilege of intimate association with her, and a permanent source of refreshment to the human spirit. She intuitively perceived life under the highest possible forms, the forms of beauty and love. Truth and goodness were, she thought, means for the achievement of those two supreme ends. Truth was to her a handmaid of the spiritualized imagination, not its tyrant. Many of those who pass lives of unremitting preoccupation with the problems of truth and goodness are wearied and encumbered with much serving. We honor them, and rightly; but if they have nothing but this to offer us, our hearts do not run to meet them." —Algar Thorold, Viareggio, Italy, 1906 (as excerpted from the introduction to his translation of "The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena)