““It takes a few years for a nature which thirsts for strong mutual love and intellectual communion to reach the point of cheerfully and contentedly renouncing what it seeks. I must reach that point, and if God wills, I shall reach it. The more one's own self dies, the more one can be to others, and, renouncing one's own personal desires, live in search of something higher and better. [Princess Alice, in a letter to her husband Prince Louis, 5 August 1877]””