She now regarded early events connected with Bellingham as one might look back upon the beginning of a run of fever.... Could he be one of the New Voices? Paula loved to think that Woman was to be the chief resource of the Lifting Age. Everywhere among men she saw the furious hunger for spiritual refreshment. Words, which she heard by mere chance from passers-by, appalled her. It was so tragically clear to her how the life led by city men starves their better natures--that there were times when she could hardly realize they did not see it. She wanted someone to make the whole world understand--that just as there are hidden spaces between the atoms of steel which made radioactivity possible, so in the human body there is a permeating space, in which the soul of man is built day by day from every thought and act; and when the worn-out physical envelope falls away--there it stands, a record to endure.... She wanted to believe that it was the office of woman to help man make this record beautiful. Just as the old Anglo-Saxon for "lady" means "giver of bread," so she loved to think that the spiritual loaf was in the keeping of woman also. Paula could not meditate without ecstasy upon the thought that a great spiritual tide was rising, soon to overflow every race and nation. The lifting of man from greedy senses to the pure happiness of brotherhood, was her most intimate and lovely hope. Back of everything, this lived and lit her mind. There were transcendent moments--she hardly dared to describe or interpret them--when cosmic consciousness swept into her brain. Swift was the visitation, nor did it leave any memorable impression, but she divined that such lofty moments, different only in degree, were responsible for the great utterances in books that are deathless. The shield was torn from her soul, leaving it naked to every world-anguish. The woman, Paula Linster, became an accumulation of all suffering--desert thirsts, untold loves, birth and death parturitions, blind cruelties of battle, the carnal lust of Famine (that soft-treading spectre), welted flesh under the screaming lash, moaning from the World's Night everywhere--until the impassioned spirit within rushed forth to the very horizon's rim to shelter an agonizing people from an angry God. Such is the genius of race-motherhood--the ineffable spirit of mediation between Father and child. One must regard with awe the reaction which follows such an outpouring.