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Their work together
For the next four years Emmeline and I worked together in the Mission, our centre being the Club for working girls. But gradually we came to wonder whether perhaps there might not be a better way of living and working than that of the Mission.
….Then came the crisis which ended in Emmeline and myself leaving the Mission. It began by our reading the life of S. Francis of Assisi by M. Sabatier. Everything towards which we were striving seemed to be expressed in the Saint who loved poverty as a bride, who lived in the open, whose
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friends were the poor, whose companions the birds and the flowers. The book sent a thrill through our work which made our life look smug and comfortable and horribly conventional and uninspired. ….
as time went on the house in which we lived settled down into a quite comfortable middle-class household with servants, regular solid meals and the unsectarian spirit gradually gave place to a decidedly sectarian one. And it was into this that the world spirit, the eternal youth, the happy simplicity of the Franciscan spirit came…..We were delighted and began planning many
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ways in which we could bring our life and work more in accord with this new inspiration.
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