“Ah! There you are touching upon the kingdoms of the unseen. All their powers can be brought to our threshold,” she repeated, “as Franklin brought the lightning out of the blank sky. We don’t know half the forces that move through the universe. Another generation will understand. We are but poor jugglers tossing glass balls, when we might be moving stars.”
“But—you tried,” the girl stammered.
Mrs. Ashby cast upon her a new look. “You saw that!” She brooded in silence for some time. At last she said: “We are in mystery still. It will take a long time. He did not understand, nor did I—enough. You have to be very strong for that!”
The girl rose. “Alas! I am used to things as they seem. I see the shapes and the obstacles of the world very plainly. I am traveling a longer road than to Damascus, and I don’t see the light. But I shall always remember what you have said to-day.
“I can only grasp at the tail of your ideas; but that one thought—that I am not of the world, but of the universe—that is sweet and splendid. It carries me on wings into regions I’ve never dreamed about. To be timeless, spaceless, to wear a garment of the Indestructible, and to share its miracles!
“I was sick of the pettiness of this little earth, and hideously afraid of the universe; afraid of its sinister unexpectedness, its soullessness towards the microcosm Me, and its imminent threat to break me so that I never could be put together again. You have made it all seem different—and wonderful. Just as if I had found that there were fairies again in the world, and that I was one of them, instead of a trampled little atom not worth bothering about.”
Julie went away shining in the new mood; but as she moved back into the material, exotic world, she felt her glorious immunity wearing away, and herself forced to battle to keep her conviction against the old calamitous universe with its desperately insoluble problems.
CHAPTER XXII
On her way home Julie happened to pass her former school. The old crone to whom she still came for medicine was standing outside the stall. The girl stopped to speak to her.