"Certainly. I do it about everything. I live by that rule now. I've absolute faith in God's guidance." Emily looked at her. "It must be beautiful," she said, "and you really think that it would be all right for me to go and talk to him, do you?" "Yes," said Jane slowly. "I think that it would be best all round." "After all, this is the woman's century," said Emily, with a sudden energy quite unlike her previous interest. "I don't know why I shouldn't." "I think that the best way to handle all our problems is to let them flow naturally to their finish," said Jane; "dammed or choked rivers always make trouble." "I should like to say just what I felt to a man just once," said Emily thoughtfully. "It would do me a world of good." "Then say it," said Jane. "Only are you really sure that he's not in love with Madeleine?" "Oh, I'm positive as to that." "Then go ahead." They parted, and Jane returned to the house. She was not so entirely spiritual that she could repress a very human kind of smile over Emily's project. CHAPTER XIII EMILY IS HERSELF FREELY AS Emily turned from Mrs. Ralston's gate, she felt more buoyant happiness than anything in life had ever hitherto brought her. She felt licensed on high authority to revel in the hitherto forbidden. She wanted Lorenzo Rath, and she thought that she understood how to get him. We may follow her thought and then we will follow where it led her, for in all the surge of the new teaching there is no lesson greater to learn than this which Emily had failed to grasp,--that the possession of tools does not make one a carver; that all things spiritual must be learned exactly as all things material. One may have so lived previously that the learning is a mere showing how, but without experience nothing, either spiritual, mental, or physical, can be efficaciously handled. When people declare that something is not true because they tried it and it failed to work, remember Emily Mead. Emily had acquired just one idea out of Jane's exposition: "That you could get anything that you want." It is the idea that hosts of people find most attractive in this world, quite irrespective of its correlative esotericism,--that the soul growing towards infinite power learns every upward step by resolutely liking what it gets. No man can climb a stair by hacking down every step passed; he climbs by being so firm upon each step that he can poise his whole weight thereon as he mounts. It is part of the supremely beautiful logic of the highest teaching that the same effort which Jesus made--every great teacher has made--is sure to make, too. We must see the Divine embodied in the Present and the Weak and the Humble, before in our own spirit we may deal, for the good of all, with the Future and Strength and Power. When one seizes upon anything God-given as a means of acquiring earth-gifts, one has but seized the empty air; the idea and then ideal have never been in the possession of such an one. There is