Forty-nine years later, as she crossed the Mississipi in the back seat of Fr. Bresnahan's Oldsmobile, Sister Eunice Larkin remembered those two articles about Matilda of Canossa and that moment of self-disgust, a flickering recollection, dancing or shuddering between the warm soft glow of piety and the harsh cold light of reason. La Signora must have known that Eunice was on some kind of cusp—that she hungered, in a way, for both versions, both Matildas, both worlds. The girl, holding on to her childhood, wanted to believe in a holy warrior princess; the young woman, who already knew that Dubuque held no future for her, wanted to scrub away the lies. What La Signora could not have anticipated was the intensity of both reactions.

Well, thought Sister Eunice, looking down into the swirling waters that divided a continent, that was how it began—the crisis of faith that led to my vocation.

At the time, she told no one—not her mother, not La Signora, certainly not the nuns at school. For the next two years she wandered in her private selva oscura, a sullen, secret atheist. She became amoral as well, in a quiet way: she stole small things from La Signora's apartment, lied about the stationer's bill, and buried some of her little sisters' dolls. She couldn't hate God because He didn't exist, but she hated the world, and herself, until, during Easter Morning Mass in her last year of high school—she had never stopped going to Mass, that would have been impossible—she saw that commitment was the only remedy for a doubt so ravaging, and for the first time in almost two years she swallowed the Host, instead of spitting it into her veil with a discreet hateful cough. On her 18th birthday, she surprised everyone by announcing her vocation. She spent the next week cleaning La Signora's apartment, one last time, as a kind of recompense for all the little sins she still had not confessed. On Sunday her uncle put her single suitcase in his Model A, and drove her to Sinsinawa. Her sisters waved goodbye from the porch. Her mother, holding a fussy new baby, waved from a window.

But what, she wondered as the Oldsmobile came off the bridge and turned onto the streets of Dubuque, had happened to that stack of exercise books, filled with the story of Matilda? She had vague recollections of intending to take the books out of town, to a corn field somewhere, and destroy them in a midnight bonfire. But had she ever done so? Had she just hidden them in a closet? Or the attic? Could they have possibly survived all these years? She looked down at the book in her lap. If she opened it, would she be able to recognize what she had written—the prose style of a sixteen-year-old clinging desperately to a child's faith?

As the Oldmobile pulled into a space marked "Fr. Bresnahan," Sister Eunice decided that the negotiations about to begin would be better served if she left those questions unanswered. She put the book, unopened, back into her satchel.