Indeed, with her indomitable persistency Julie had won out of this human ruin some of the mellowed grace of a more fortunate old age. With the creative power of her devotion she had gone forth into the dark waters engulfing the old woman, had struggled there, and dragged her back into life; and having won a precarious hold upon her affection, she poured forth the overflowing joy of her heart in her service.
Miss Fogg continued to stare at her reflection, her lip trembling slightly. It seemed as though the vision of her past self was given faintly back to her out of the mirror. She bent over and looked still closer. “Why,” she said slowly, “that’s me—that’s the way I used to be ’fore I lost my ambition.” She raised her eyes to Julie with a faltering surprise. “Why,” she cried, “Why you’ve give me back to myself.”
She patted the ruffles at her neck, and smoothed her hair with a fleeting return of vanity.
“I was always a great hand to keep myself fixed up nice,” she boasted. “An’ now you’ve put new life into me.”
Julie looked at her suddenly, her eyes wide and shining.
“That was what I came for,” she said solemnly. She took the old withered hand and pressed it against her own breast that was so warm and full of living happiness. “I came to bring you life,” she repeated. “I have so much—I’m so happy, so alive! I want you to share it.” She still pressed the withered hand against her breast with her warm and eager ones. “It’s all here in my heart, all the happiness and the life that any one in the world could need. It’s here for you. Don’t you feel it running out to you?”
It seemed to Julie in that moment of intense donation as though indeed something out of her very heart rushed forth for the other’s re-creation. Her eyes burning with an almost unearthly light, she gazed down at the old woman and wrung a flickering response even out of that half dead personality, so that she leaned her head against Julie’s breast. “If anybody could put life into my old carcass, it would be you,” she said. “You couldn’t be any sweeter to me if I was your own mother.”
“You are my mother!” Julie cried passionately. “My mother, an’ my sister, an’ my child!” With the words, something seemed to open within her and she was conscious of so tremendous an inrush of life and insight that she was half frightened and made giddy by the swirl of it.
She tried to tell Tim about it that night after supper. “I don’t know what it was,” she said, still half frightened, “but it was like something broke inside of me. I wasn’t just myself any more. An’ when I said that about her being my mother, it was true. An’ she was more than that even: she was my very self. It was like—like—” she hesitated; “like all my happiness and love had broke over and some of it flowed into her. It did flow into her, some of me did spill over into her. And just for a moment it was like the whole world was rushing through me. I was down at the heart of all the world. At the red-hot centre of us all. There wasn’t anybody so low I couldn’t understand ’em, or so high up my happiness couldn’t reach to them. We were all brothers an’ sisters together there. Just for a minute—just for a second, Tim, the whole world was running through me. My love—our love—had broken open the doors, an’ let in all the rest of the world. But it—it scares me,” she faltered, gripping his hand tight. “It’s like a channel had been plowed straight through me by a river in freshet, an’ it’ll never close up.”
“I know,” he returned, with the same awe. “I understand. I saw it, too.”