A month after this she found among her letters one morning four smoothly ecstatic pages from Sylvie Carter. Ralph had asked Sylvie to marry him, and Sylvie had said Yes. Sylvie wrote that she expected to be very happy, and that she was going to do her best to make Ralph so, too. The next day brought a half-page from Ralph. It stated that something Hagar had said had set him to thinking. She had said that there was being a line drawn and that some men and some women were finding themselves together on either side. He thought there was truth in it, and that, after all, one should marry within one's class; otherwise a perpetual clash of opinions, fatal to love. There followed a terse announcement of his engagement to Sylvie, and he signed himself, "Your affectionate cousin, Ralph Coltsworth." But it was Old Miss whose letter was wholly aggrieved and indignant.... CHAPTER XXXIII GILEAD BALM The second letter from Old Miss came in February. The Colonel had suddenly failed and taken to his bed. Old Miss believed that he would get up again,--there was, she said, no reason why he shouldn't,--but in the mean time there he lay. He was a little wandering in his mind, and he had taken to thinking that Hagar was in the house, and a little girl still, and demanding to see her. Old Miss suggested that she should come to Gilead Balm. She went at once. On the train, thundering south through a snowy night, she lay awake until half of her journey was over. Scenes and moments, occurrences of the outer and inner life, went by her mind like some endless, shifting tapestry. Childhood, girlhood, womanhood, work and play, the daily, material task and the inner lift, lift, and ever-strengthening knowledge of the impalpable--that last was not tapestry; it was height and breadth and depth, and something more. The old, wide travel came back to her; shifting gleams of Eastern cities, deserts, time-broken temples, mountains, vineyards, haunted groves, endless surrounding, azure, murmuring seas.... Medway, white-clothed and helmeted, in his rolling chair.... The whistle shrieked; the train stopped with a jar at some lighted station, then, regathering its forces, rushed and roared on through the February night. Now it was the last three years and more: they passed in panorama before her. Stages and stairways and scaffoldings by which the world-spirit might mount an inch: ferments and leavens: voices telling of democracy and fair play and care for your neighbour's freedom as for your own, your woman-neighbour and your man-neighbour. Through her mind ran all the enormous detail of the work being pursued over all the country; countless meetings, speeches, appeals, talks to a dozen gathered together or to two or three; letters and letters and letters, press and magazine utterances, organization, the difficult raising of money, legislative work, petitions, canvassing; drudgery in myriad detail, letters and letters, voice and pen.... And all the opposition--blind