Upon her mother's death from typhus in 1834 Mallinckrodt, at seventeen, took over the management of her father's household and the education of her three little siblings. In 1840 her father retired from public service to his manor at Boeddekken near Paderborn and it was at this stage she entertained notions of becoming a Vincentian Sister. In 1835 her father paid for her to have a trip to Paris and in 1836 she accompanied Bernard von Hartmann and his wife (her paternal uncle and his wife) on a trip across Belgium in places such as Louvain and Brussels; she also visited the site of the Waterloo battle. The poor of the village would ask her to tend the sick. In winter she and her father lived in Paderborn where there was a women's group that tended the sick in their homes and she soon joined this group. In 1840 the group opened a kindergarten to provide safekeeping and care for neglected children and placed it in her charge. From this developed an institution for blind children who were provided a home in a former Capuchin convent where she took up residence after the death of her father in 1842; she was at his bedside as he died. In 1842 she did the Spiritual Exercises for the first time.