A great calm hand seemed laid on my shoulder, so that my fever sank, my pulses were quieted. I stood motionless, feeling slowly pulsating through me a vaster rhythm than the throbbing irregularity of my own doubting heart. A great soundless benediction was breathed upon me out of the man-wrought beauty around and above me.
Up, up, up, I raised my eyes, following the soaring of the many-columned pillars, and something in my heart burst its leaden bonds and soared up out of my breast....
Yes, here was beauty, here was that beauty I had forgotten and denied ... and men had made it! It had nothing to do with the glare of the indifferent sun, with the callous face of our calamity. Men had made this beauty, imperfect, warring, doubting, suffering, sinning men had upreared this perfect creation. They had created this beauty out of their faith in righteousness, and they would again create other beauty, out of other manifestations of righteousness, long after this war was a forgotten nightmare....
"What is that shining on your face, mother?"
I put my hand up. My cheeks are wet. "Tears, dear."
"O mother, why do you cry?"
"Because I am very happy, my darling."
A FAIR EXCHANGE
The energetic, well-dressed man who walked so quickly in spite of his gray hair was quite out of breath from the unusual experience of mounting stairs on foot, when he stepped into the anteroom. There he looked about him with a keenly observant eye. The room had obviously not been intended as the entrance to modern offices. Its dingy, paneled walls and darkened carved ceiling dated at least from the time when the ancestors of the newcomer were hunting Indians in the untracked forests of Massachusetts. It was a forlorn cheerless apology for a convenient, well-equipped business waiting-room. And yet the intelligent, keen eyes now looking at it saw in it ... what? Something he could not analyze, something he tried to express. "What the devil is it about their little old holes...?" he asked himself with the fresh vivid curiosity which was his habit about phenomena new to him.