No doubt he understood the pressing importance of the matter to me, from the trouble I had taken to secure an early interview with him. He heard me out very soberly, and answered my questions as honestly as a thinking man could. Not a word of what he said remains in my mind, but I remember going away with the impression that it was possible to live without knowing everything, after all, and that I might even try to be happy in a world full of riddles.
In such ways as this I sought peace of mind, but I never achieved more than a brief truce. I was coming to believe that only the stupid could be happy, and that life was pretty hard on the philosophical, when the great new interest of science came into my life, and scattered my blue devils as the sun scatters the night damps.
Some of my friends in the Natural History Club were deeply versed in the principles of evolutionary science, and were able to guide me in my impetuous rush to learn everything in a day. I was in a hurry to deduce, from the conglomeration of isolated facts that I picked up in the lectures, the final solution of all my problems. It took both patience and wisdom to check me and at the same time satisfy me, I have no doubt; but then I was always fortunate in my friends. Wisdom and patience in plenty were spent on me, and I was instructed and inspired and comforted. Of course my wisest teacher was not able to tell me how the original spark of life was kindled, nor to point out, on the starry map of heaven, my future abode. The bread of absolute knowledge I do not hope to taste in this life. But all creation was remodelled on a grander scale by the utterances of my teachers; and my problems, though they deepened with the expansion of all nameable phenomena, were carried up to the heights of the impersonal, and ceased to torment me. Seeing how life and death, beginning and end, were all parts of the process of being, it mattered less in what particular ripple of the flux of existence I found myself. If past time was a trooping of similar yesterdays, back over the unbroken millenniums, to the first moment, it was simple to think of future time as a trooping of knowable to-days, on and on, to infinity. Possibly, also, the spark of life that had persisted through the geological ages, under a million million disguises, was vital enough to continue for another earth-age, in some shape as potent as the first or last. Thinking in æons and in races, instead of in years and individuals, somehow lightened the burden of intelligence, and filled me anew with a sense of youth and well-being, that I had almost lost in the pit of my narrow personal doubts.
No one who understands the nature of youth will be misled, by this summary of my intellectual history, into thinking that I actually arranged my newly acquired scientific knowledge into any such orderly philosophy as, for the sake of clearness, I have outlined above. I had long passed my teens, and had seen something of life that is not revealed to poetizing girls, before I could give any logical account of what I read in the book of cosmogony. But the high peaks of the promised land of evolution did flash on my vision in the earlier days, and with these to guide me I rebuilt the world, and found it much nobler than it had ever been before, and took great comfort in it.
I did not become a finished philosopher from hearing a couple of hundred lectures on scientific subjects. I did not even become a finished woman. If anything, I grew rather more girlish. I remember myself as very merry in the midst of my serious scientific friends, and I can think of no time when I was more inclined to play the tomboy than when off for a day in the woods, in quest of botanical and zoological specimens. The freedom of outdoors, the society of congenial friends, the delight of my occupation—all acted as a strong wine on my mood, and sent my spirits soaring to immoderate heights I am very much afraid I made myself a nuisance, at times, to some of the more sedate of my grown-up companions. I wish they could know that I have truly repented. I wish they had known at the time that it was the exuberance of my happiness that played tricks, and no wicked desire to annoy kind friends. But I am sure that those who were offended have long since forgotten or forgiven, and I need remember nothing of those wonderful days other than that a new sun rose above a new earth for me, and that my happiness was like unto the iridescent dews.