Possibly her unhappy and childless marriage determined the non-development or the mortification of any tendencies to such a temper. But the absence referred to was more probably caused by her congenital psychical temperament and state themselves; and, if so, it would point to her as a person hardly intended for marriage, and as one who, through no fault of her own, could not satisfy the less purely mental of the perfectly licit requirements which make up the many-levelled wants of a normal, or at least ordinary, man’s and husband’s nature. Pompilia’s dying words, in Browning’s “Ring and the Book,” would, probably at any time after her premature involuntary marriage, have found an appropriate place upon Catherine’s lips, had she ever thought it loyal or kind to utter them: “‘In heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage.’ How like Jesus Christ to say that!”
Yet it is at least as difficult to think of her as really intended for the cloister. That early wish of hers to join a religious community, sincere and keen as it no doubt was at the time, evidently faded away completely, probably already before her conversion thirteen years later, and certainly before her widowhood. Perhaps she would have been best suited, throughout her adult years, to the life of an unmarried woman living in the world,--to the kind of life which she actually led during her widowhood, with such changes in it as her earlier, robuster health would have involved for those earlier years. She would thus, throughout her life, have divided her energies, in various degrees and combinations, between attention to the multiform, practical, physico-emotional wants of the poor; the give and take of stimulation and enlightenment to and from some few large-hearted, heroically operative friends; and, as source and centre of all such actual achievements and of indefinitely greater possibilities, indeed as a life already largely eternal and creative,--contemplative prayer of various degrees and kinds. But such a life, if it would have left out much disappointment and suffering, and not for herself alone, yet would also have been without the special occasions and incentives to her sudden conversion and long patience and detailed magnanimity. Her life, in appearing on the surface as less of a failure, would at bottom have been less of a spiritual success.