gently, like a philosopher,
who smokes that he may dream; Nahum with furious jets and frequent
removals of his pipe for scowling speeches. John Sargent did not
smoke at all. He had left off cigars first, then even his pipe. He
gave the money which he saved thereby to Mrs. Atkins as a bonus on
his board money.

The lamp burned dimly in the blue fog of tobacco smoke, and the
windows where the curtains were not drawn were blanks of silvery
moonlight. Ellen sat on the doorstep outside and heard the talk. She
did not understand it, nor take much interest in it. Their minds
were fixed upon the way of living, and hers upon life itself. She
could bring her simplicity to bear upon the world-old question of
riches and poverty and labor, but this temporal adjunct of stocks
and markets was as yet beyond her. Her mother had gone to her aunt
Eva's and she sat alone out in the wide mystery of the summer night,
watching the lovely shift of radiance and shadows, as she might have
watched the play of a kaleidoscope, seeing the beauty of the new
combinations, and seeing without comprehending the unit which
governed them all. The night was full of cries of insistent life and
growth, of birds and insects, of calls of children, and now and then
the far-away roar of railroad trains. It was nearly midsummer. The
year was almost at its height, but had not passed it. Growth and
bloom was still in the ascendant, and had not yet attained that
maturity of perfection beyond which is the slope of death.

Everywhere about her were the revolutions of those unseen wheels of
nature whose immortal trend is towards the completion of time, and
whose momentum can overlap the grave; and the child was within them
and swept onward with the perfecting flowers, and the ripening
fruit, and the insects which were feeling their wings; and all
unconsciously, in a moment as it were, she unfolded a little farther
towards her own heyday of bloom. Suddenly from those heights of the
primitive and the eternal upon which a child starts and where she
still lingered she saw her future before her, shining with new
lights, and a wonderful conviction of bliss to come was over her. It
was that conviction which comes at times to all unconquered souls,
and which has the very essence of truth in it, since it overleaps
the darkness of life that lies between them and that bliss. Suddenly
Ellen felt that she was born to great happiness, and all that was to
come was towards that end.