"It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn. Slow processions of clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull and gray and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there. Sometimes a moaning gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the path--there was no life else." Driven from place to place by the conflict within her, she sat down at last to rest "where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. All was dark, and cold, and still." Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds "with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day." And with this unlooked-for brightness passed into her soul "a beam from its true sun," whose radiance, she says, never departed more. This sudden illumination was not, however, an unreasoning, unaccountable one. In that moment flashed upon her the solution of the problem of self, whose perplexities had followed her from her childish days. She comprehended at once the struggle in which she had been well-nigh overcome, and the illusion which had till then made victory impossible. "I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space and human nature; but I saw also that it must do it. I saw there was no self, that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God.... My earthly pain at not being recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of passionate sorrow, and all check, all failure, all ignorance, have seemed temporary ever since." The progress of this work already brings us to that portion of Margaret's life in which her character was most likely to be judged of by the world around her as already determined in its features and aspect. That this judgment was often a misjudgment is known to all who remember Margaret's position in Boston society in the days of her lessons and conversations. A really vulgar injustice was often done her by those who knew of her only her appearance and supposed pretensions. Those to whom she never was a living presence may naturally ask of those who profess to have known her, whether this injustice did not originate with herself, whether she did not do herself injustice by habitually presenting herself in an attitude which was calculated to heighten the idea, already conceived, of her arrogance and overweening self-esteem.