Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/252

 she went out into the city to care for the sick and the poor she began for the first time to find her place in the world and to forget her childhood. Among the wretched she went about with that same humble manner of supplication, seeking to please them in return for kindliness. She entered their squalid houses as a creature unworthy of serving them. She sat at the bedside of old men dying of loathsome diseases and young mothers who died bearing their first children. She sat by young and handsome men cut off in the midst of life and risked her life by the side of children ill with smallpox and scarlet fever. She ate what the poor ate and slept as they slept, asking nothing of them in return but a word of kindness. And even the young men who loved only youth and the joy of being alive and the feeling of the hot blood in their veins came in the end to find a strange kind of beauty in the presence of sister Annunziata. It was an unearthly beauty that seemed less concerned with the ugly body and face of Sister Annunziata than with all that surrounded her. With her by their side even the young found death quiet and peaceful. They loved the gentleness of the huge misshapen hands. A kind of light seemed to flow from the ugly face.

And she knew sometimes that they called her The Ugly One and The Mad One and she smiled to herself and was glad because they would not have called her such names if there had not been affection in their hearts. In a way her body came to exist no longer save as an instrument to serve her spirit. She came, unlike other women, to cherish it not as an instrument of love or of beauty but as something