Dr. Keefe responds to receiving a final draft of a colleague's manuscript of translations, "Latin Prayers." She notes never feeling closer to a distant historical age than in reading their prayers, all the more comforting in the present difficult time, by which she means the invasion and bombing of Iraq. She tells Dr. Cowley, "you helped me to see that our prayers, fasting, vigils, and protests were and are not entirely in vain. As you say, perhaps they are the shadow of a conscience that something is very wrong here."