"How good is man's life, the mere living!--how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!" Who felt that?--Not even the poets immemorial who so sang--sang often in sadness of heart! They felt only the promise that the future cast before her. Association of ideas was so strong and quick within her that she was apt to call up images, not singly, but in series and sequences. Her mind swept away from the West Indian sea. She saw her mother at Gilead Balm, beating her wings against invisible bars; the woman on the packet-boat, racked with anxiety, her child in her arms, begging her way to her sick mate; the figure of the convict at the lock, Thomasine in the silk mill, Omega Street.... She thought of Rachel and her married life, of things which she had heard at the Settlement, and the pain in Elizabeth Eden's eyes as she told them. She thought of Eglantine and its insidious sapping, sapping ... of Miss Serena and her stunted, small industries and too-obedient soul. She thought of Miss Bedford, and of Francie Smythe, and of Mrs. LeGrand. She seemed again to hear Mrs. LeGrand upon Roger Michael. She thought of the Bishop and the day he passed sentence upon a child for reading a great book. She saw the thicket back of the ridge, and dogs set by a human being upon a human being. She saw winter streets in New York, and the light shining on the three balls of the pawnbrokers, and a bread-line, and men and women huddled on park benches while the wind shook the leafless trees. She saw Wall Street and St. Timothy's. Her mind passed overseas. Russia--three summers before they had been there. Medway, though he laughed at her, had agreed to a stepping aside which she proposed. She wished to see Tolstoy. It was always easy to him to arrange such things, and it had ended in their being invited for two days to Yásnaya Polyána. She saw again the old man and heard his slow words. _Non-resistance_--but his mind, through his pen, was not non-resistant! It acted, it scourged, it fought, it strove to build and to clear the ground that it might build. He deceived himself, the tremendous old man. He thought himself quietist as Lao-Tzu, but there in that bare, small study he cried, _Allah! Allah!_ and fought like a Mohammedan. Russia and the burden of Russia ... the world and the burden of the world. She thought of the East, and now her mind entered Zenanas--of India, and it was the child marriages; of Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and it was the veiled women, proclaimed without souls. She saw the eunuchs at the gate. Away to Europe--and she saw that concept grading away, but never quite gone, never quite gone. Woman as mind undying, self-authoritative and unrelated, the arbiter of her own destiny, the definer of her own powers, with an equal goal and right-of-way--few were the earthly places where that ray fell! "How good is man's life, the mere living--"