"It needs it," she said simply.
"Yes, I think it needs it!"
"Sure!" the mason asserted resoundingly.
A little while afterwards the judge said to the driver,—
"I think that we will go home now, John."
XLIX
In these last moments something had happened to Adelle. While the judge and her cousin had been talking, she had been watching the stream of humanity flow past her, not hearing what the two were saying, listening to the voice of her own soul. It is difficult to describe in exact words the nature of Adelle's mental life. Ideas never came to her in orderly succession. They were not evolved out of other ideas, nor gathered up from obvious sources and repeated by her brain, parrotlike, as with so many of us. They came to her slowly from some reservoir of her being, came painfully, strugglingly, and often were accompanied to their birth by an inner glow of emotional illumination like the present when she saw herself and her child living the life of Clark's Field. But after they had struggled into birth, they became eternal possessions of her consciousness, never to be forgotten, or debated, or denied. She had thus slowly and painfully achieved whatever personality she had since she came for the first time a pale child into Judge Orcutt's court. If any one had talked to her about the "obligations of wealth," "social service," or "love of humanity," she would have listened with a vacant stare and replied like a child of ten. The judge seemed to know that.
It was only by idleness and Archie and unhappiness and the fire and the tragic death of her child that she had come to realize that there were other people in the world besides herself and the few who were a necessary part of herself, and that these other lives were of importance to themselves and might be almost as important to her as her own. It had taken Adelle a good many years of foolish living and reckless use of her magic lamp to get this simple understanding of life. But she was not yet twenty-six, really at the start of life. If already she had come so far along the road, what might she not reach by fifty? In such matters it is the destination alone that counts....
Just now, as has been said, a greater illumination had come over her spirit than was ever there before, although for the life of her Adelle could not have expressed in words what she felt, or at this time put her new thought into concrete acts. But with Adelle acts had never been wanting when the time for them came, and her slow mind had absorbed all the necessary ideas. The judge recognized the illumination in the young woman at his side. For the first time in her life, perhaps, at least for one of the rare moments of it, her face was in no sense vacant. The wide gray eyes that looked forth upon the sordid world of Clark's Field were seeing eyes, though they did not see merely physical facts. Instead of their usual blankness or passive intelligence, they had a quality in them now of dream. And this gave Adelle's pale face a certain rare loveliness that in human faces does not depend upon color or line or emotional vivacity. It is rather the still radiance of the inner spirit, penetrating in some inexplicable manner the physical envelope and creating a beauty far more enduring, more compelling to those who perceive it, than any other form of beauty intelligible to human eyes. The judge perceived it. As the carriage slowly retraced its way through the crowded streets of Clark's Field, he silently took the young woman's hand and held it within his own, smiling gently before him as one who understood what was too complex to put in words. He was an old man now, and it was permitted him to express thus the compulsion of Adelle's rare loveliness, thus to confide to her the sympathy of his own dreaming heart. The little ungloved hand lay within his old hand, warm and passive, not clinging, content to rest there in peace.