The schoolgirls try to stop the staircase construction

The schoolgirls try to stop the staircase construction by asking Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy to dismiss the carpenter he has hired, fearing that human effort will displace the miracle they have been seeking from Saint Joseph. Their campaign brings a conflict over faith into the open: whether devotion means waiting for divine intervention or accepting the work being done in front of them. Lizzy Enders, who has found calm in the chapel’s prayers but sees no reason to refuse a capable worker, opposes the girls’ plan. The staircase is ultimately built, without a banister, and its completion gives the episode a different conclusion from the miracle the girls had imagined.

Background: A Novena and a Carpenter

The appeal begins on the morning after the final night of a novena to Saint Joseph. Lizzy had grown accustomed to the chapel’s incense, Latin, and responses to prayer; the evening services offered a quiet interval in which she could sort through the confusion of school and think about Mama. That private comfort provides one background to the girls’ collective devotion, but the novena also has a particular request attached to it: the chapel needs a staircase, and the girls are waiting to see what Saint Joseph will do.

By morning, hammering from the chapel announces that the Bishop’s hired carpenter is at work. The girls see his employment not simply as a practical response to a building need but as a threat to the novena’s purpose. In their view, accepting a human solution may tell Saint Joseph that his help is no longer wanted. The carpenter’s low status sharpens their objection: they refer to him as an old beggar, even as his labor offers the possibility of completing the staircase.

The Plan to Persuade the Bishop

Rosalyn and Consuello confront Lizzy in the hallway, where the boarding girls have gathered protectively around Elinora. Consuello complains that the carpenter is making a mess and asks how Saint Joseph can perform a miracle while he is working inside the chapel. Lizzy answers that the Bishop hired him. The girls’ argument is not that the carpenter lacks authorization; it is that his authorized work may undermine their petition by making the problem appear solved.

Winona makes the logic explicit: the girls believe a saint might not help people who have asked for assistance and then acted as though they no longer needed it. Lucy explains that they are going to the Bishop’s farm for lunch, having told him they had important matters to discuss. They intend to use the visit to ask him to stop the carpenter. The plan gives their religious objection a concrete form: they will appeal to the authority who hired the worker and try to reverse his decision.

Lizzy protests that they cannot do this. Lucy is confident that Elinora’s uncle will understand their reasoning because he is himself devoted to Saint Joseph, and she predicts that the carpenter will be gone by nightfall. The narrative records the girls’ intended appeal and their confidence, but not what they say to the Bishop at lunch or how he responds. Their expressed expectation should therefore be distinguished from the outcome the account later establishes: the staircase is completed.

Elinora and Lizzy’s Opposition

The girls’ campaign is entangled with Elinora’s announced religious calling. Lizzy notices that Elinora is not accusing her, as she might have expected; instead, Elinora stands with her eyes lowered while Winona keeps an arm around her shoulder. When Lizzy asks what is wrong, the others explain that Elinora intends to become a nun and marry Jesus. Lizzy privately reads the calling as an act designed to regain the Bishop’s favor, and suspects that Elinora will use it to help remove the carpenter so the girls can return to waiting for a miracle. This is Lizzy’s judgment of Elinora’s motives, not an independently confirmed account of them.

Consuello also makes clear that the girls’ grievance includes Lizzy’s position in the household. She reminds Lizzy that she was given the best guest room because the Bishop thought she was ill, then warns her not to imagine herself his pet. Lizzy rejects both the idea that she belongs to the Bishop and the waiting that Consuello defends: she does not want to sit idle when a carpenter is already building the staircase. Winona says that the girls will report Lizzy’s view to the Bishop alongside Elinora’s account of her calling. The disagreement thus becomes personal as well as theological: Lizzy is challenged as an outsider whose comfort is resented, while she insists that neither privilege nor passive expectation defines her position.

Completion and the Meaning of Faith

The later account shows the staircase completed, but without a banister. When Winona asks why the carpenter did not make one, Sister Roberta answers that he wanted to show that they needed faith. She then demonstrates a way down that she considers feasible, descending backward on her hands and knees, step by step. The others pray as she makes her careful descent and sigh with relief when she reaches the bottom. Her response turns faith into action and practice: she does not wait for the structure to become safer before engaging with it, but tests how it can be used as it stands.

Sister Roberta’s response does not establish that the girls’ appeal to the Bishop caused or prevented any particular stage of the work; the account supplies no result of their lunch conversation. It does establish that their hoped-for stoppage did not prevent the carpenter from completing the staircase. The girls had treated his labor as a possible declaration that Saint Joseph was no longer needed, whereas Sister Roberta reads the finished, imperfect structure through faith. The episode therefore holds practical work and religious belief in tension without making them simple opposites: the carpenter builds, the girls pray, and Sister Roberta’s careful descent makes faith visible as something practiced rather than merely awaited.