n with heavy blocks, were passing their
intellectual matters one to the other, she came to know that love is
giving; that as love pours out in service, the Holy Spirit floods in;
that spaciousness of soul is immortality; that out of the spaciousness
of soul, great sons are born.... And here and there down the ages,
these great sons have appeared, veered the race right at moments of
impending destruction, and buoyed it on."

He had not raised his voice above that low animate tone, which has not
half the carrying quality of a whisper. Beth had hoped for such a
moment, for in her heart she knew that Vina Nettleton had felt this
power of his. With her whole soul, she listened, and the look upon his
face which she wanted for the portrait lived in her mind as he resumed:

"I ask you to look how every evil, every combination of hell, has
arisen to tear at the flanks of the race, for this is history. Yet a
few women, and a few men, the gifts of women, have arisen to save....
Do you think that war or money, or lust of any kind, shall destroy us
_now_, in this modern rousing hour, with woman at last coming into her
own--when they have never yet in the darkest hour of the world,
vanquished a single great dream of a pure woman? And now women
_generally_ are rising to their full dreams; approaching each moment
nearer to that glorious formula for the making of immortals...."

He smiled suddenly into her white face. "I tell you, Beth Truba," he
said, "there isn't a phase, a moment, of this harsh hour of transition,
that isn't majestic with promise!... It's a good picture.... Dear old
mother, in every province of the soul, she is a step nearer the Truth
than man. The little matters of the intellect, from which she has been
barred for centuries, she shall override like a Brunhilde. Even that
which men called her sins were from loving.... Gaunt mother with bended
back--she has stood between God and the world; she has been the vessel
of the Holy Spirit; she _is_ the Holy Spirit in the world; and when she
shall fully know her greatness, then prophets of her bearing shall walk
the earth."

They wound through the park in the rainy dusk, emerging in Fifty-ninth
Street; and even then, Beth did not care to ride, so they finished the
distance to her studio in the Avenue crowd.

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER

THAT PARK PREDICAMENT

More May days had passed. Bedient came in from one of his
night-strolls, just as an open carriage stopped in fron