 an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine startled him.
It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No word, no clew, no hint, of
the divine had ever reached him before. He had never believed in the divine. He
had always been irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their
immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had contended; it was here
and now, then darkness everlasting. But what he had seen in her eyes was soul -
immortal soul that could never die. No man he had known, nor any woman, had
given him the message of immortality. But she had. She had whispered it to him
the first moment she looked at him. Her face shimmered before his eyes as he
walked along, - pale and serious, sweet and sensitive, smiling with pity and
tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never dreamed purity
could be. Her purity smote him like a blow. It startled him. He had known good
and bad; but purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.
And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of goodness and of
cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal life.
    And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was not fit to
carry water for her - he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a fantastic
stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and talk with her that
night. It was accidental. There was no merit in it. He did not deserve such
fortune. His mood was essentially religious. He was humble and meek, filled with
self-disparagement and abasement. In such frame of mind sinners come to the
penitent form. He was convicted of sin. But as the meek and lowly at the
penitent form catch splendid glimpses of their future lordly existence, so did
he catch similar glimpses of the state he would gain to by possessing her. But
this possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from
possession as he had known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw himself
climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her, pleasuring in
beautiful and noble things with her. It was a soul-possession he dreamed,
refined beyond any grossness, a free comradeship of spirit that he could not put
into definite thought. He did not think it. For that matter, he did not think at
all.
