It was an evening clear, moonless, with a marvelous purple over water and sky. Every light of the ships in harbor was reflected, a trailing glory, in the glassy bay; and the ferry was plowing through them, with its dull, monotonous pulse like the beat of a heart. The white bulk of a steamer moved directly before its course, white lights, green, red lights—the _Nippon Maru_ outward bound. Florence’s eyes followed it. And there stirred faintly in her the passion she had always cherished for the mysterious other side of the world—Japan, and that great continent beyond it. And as the immensity unrolled before her—the thousands of miles, the millions of people with passions identical, with ideals unintelligible to hers, but in the great sum of existence as necessary—the vast, varied face of the world diminished, dwarfed her own identity. She had one of those fortunate moments when, the body being very weary, the spirit takes its opportunity and mounts beyond the body’s demands. If she had put it to herself, she would have said she had “got outside of things.” It floated before her, more like an impression than a thought, that to have had one’s happiness was what counted, though it passed like the glimpse of purple sea. And the eye of the soul that could catch it, could treasure it up to carry into some dim, empty, echoing time-to-come. The time of activity, of struggle for what was most desirable, most beautiful, or most necessary to life—the delights, the sufferings, the defeating, the half successes—this time inevitably was ended. Sometimes the change life made was death, sometimes only another face of life, as now it came to her—a time of waiting, of watching, of trying to perceive and understand, from the passionate, personal motives acting themselves out around her, the great intention of the whole. Before her the lights of the city were all alive, trailing around the water-front, marching over the hills, ringing them with fire, and trembling away into the large stars of the low, soft sky. Her hand was on the rail, and she dropped her chin upon it, looking longingly, searchingly into the heart of the glittering tangle, as if it were the veritable tangle of life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected. ○ Unbalanced quotation marks were left as the author intended. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Page 159 “envelop” was changed to “envelope”. ○ Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mrs. Essington, by Esther Chamberlain and Lucia Chamberlain