The expression of the face softened.
“You will receive a letter to-morrow. I have taken this method that you might act freely. Without sympathy there could be no—” The voice died away; the figure dimmed and a quivering passed through the air-drawn scene. The next moment, nothing was visible but the sun-steeped sea and shore.
Miriam stayed where she was for a long time. The influence had not been hypnotic, but had conveyed a strong sense of spiritual harmony and of enlightenment. She recognized the value of spontaneity. Knowledge was not acquisition, but revelation. Her visitor had understood her need.
Miriam was a woman of her time. After acquiring political equality with man, the other sex had soon turned from political activities to science. Her more finely organized and fresher brain and her spiritual intuition opened to her realms of conquest over nature and methods of achieving it hitherto unimagined. The revolutionary investigations and discoveries of later years had been woman’s work. Etheric heat, planetary motive-power, electron light were gifts from woman’s hand. She had divined the parallelism between material fact and spiritual truth. A lever so powerful began to make the rock of human ignorance stir in its bed. The birthday of the universal man seemed near.
To Miriam, keeping abreast of progress, had come some time since the dream of actual interplanetary communication, not by interchange of signals merely, but by bodily transference from the earth to other worlds of our system. She had never confided this ambition to any person, and her fantom visitor had been the first to divine it—for such had seemed to be her intimation. Her father, a man of a past age, never suspected it. All the girl’s studies had had this ambition for their end, but hitherto her progress had seemed small. But to-day for the first time she could feel, with a tremulous joy, that her labor and self-discipline had fitted her for what was to come. A powerful hand had grasped hers and a profound and fearless intelligence would direct her course. It was an added joy to know that her cooperation was needed even for her guide’s masterful intelligence.
The personal equation had begun to be recognized as the most important agency of man’s rule over nature. It found its analogy in the inter-atomic force. By solving the true nature of the isolation which the personal equation implies, the way to its mastery was found to lie in the compensating attraction of innate sympathies. Proper use of this vital truth could result in achievements otherwise unattainable and seemingly miraculous.
Miriam’s mother, a lovely and intelligent woman, had died when the girl was fifteen; her father, though a man of the old fashion, was in his way a genius, of immense energy and ability; and the whole tide of his ardent Celtic nature flowed into love for his daughter. He had the insight to perceive that she must allowed great freedom of choice and action in order to secure her best development; he let her make her own rules of conduct and education, and merely supplied whatever means and facilities she required; there was complete mutual love and confidence between them. She came and went, studied and played, as she pleased, without supervision or question; and as she grew up the visible results were fully satisfactory. Her bodily strength and symmetry were united with supple grace; she was trained in the great gymnasiums which the influence of the king had made fashionable; she was expert in fencing, swimming, running and wrestling; and, besides her aptness in flying, was a consummate horsewoman. Terence Mayne never learned personal flight, and hardly liked to have his girl “mix herself up with a lot of ducks and geese,” as he put it; but he was always eager and proud to act as her cavalier on a ride, and they were often seen cantering down the Long Drive side by side, he with his bushy gray hair uncovered to the breeze, thumping up and down on his big hunter; she undulating easily beside him on her fine-limbed Arab. The vision of her beauty haunted the dreams of many an impassioned youth. But Miriam, though always kind and frank, drew back from male intimacies. She was wedded to science and desired no human husband. Her father forbore to urge her.
“A pretty gal is a good thing; let ’em stay so long as they will. The woman in ’em will have her say in the long run; don’t let us be meddling!” This was his rejoinder to the suggestions of sympathetic friends.
On her side, she recognized his cordial and sociable temperament, and never refused her cooperation in his great dinners and receptions—a queenlike presence, with her black hair and sea-gray eyes, moving through the glowing vistas of the great rooms. Side by side with her intellectual proclivities, there was in her a deep emotional quality, which found expression in forms of art, and which she used to give distinction to the plans and details of her father’s social enterprises.
But the greater part of her time was devoted to thoughts and effort far removed from such matters; these had for her a sort of sanctity, due to their exalted character. Science, in that age, had a spiritual soul which lifted it toward the religious level. The solution of her problems was connected with the future of mankind; it required courage to face even the prevision of them. Transcendent moments visited her, mingled with a sentiment of profound personal humility. She was conscious at times of an appalling loneliness, chilling her to the finger-tips with delicious terrors. But anon the warm blood flowed back to her heart, and she would rise and pace her chamber, crowned with the hope of being forever known and blessed as the giver to her race of unimagined benefits.