As he walked on in the tumultuous sensations of dream, the discords of living were swept away: the beautiful flesh that rotted; the noble human figures that it was well to have covered; the shame of woman's form, of man's corrupted carcass; the world that has, with its beauty and charm, side by side with the world that has not, with its grime and its nastiness. In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing. The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great reasonableness in things, and he had found it. Men fought and gambled to-day in the factories, the shops, the railroads, as they fought in the dark ages, for the same ends--for sensual pleasures, gross love of power, barbaric show. They would fight on, glorifying their petty deeds of personal gain; but not always. The mystery of human defeat in the midst of success would be borne in upon them. The barbarians of trade would give way, as had the barbarians of feudal war. This heaving, moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility. His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the charnel house. He forgave life for its disgusting manifestations, for the triviality of Lindsay, for the fleshy Porter with his finger in the stock market, for the ambitious Carson who would better have rested in his father's dugout in Iowa. They were a part of the travailing world, without which it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. It was childish to dislike them; with this God-given peace and understanding one could never be impatient, nor foam at the mouth. He could enter into himself and remove them from him, from _her_. Some day they two would quietly leave it all, depart to a place where as man and woman they could live life simply, sweetly. Yes, they had already departed, had faded away from the strife, and he was no longer in doubt about anything. He had ceased to think, and for the first moment in his life he was content to feel. All emotion over life must come to be transmuted to this--an elemental state of conviction transforming the tawdry acts of life. There was but this one everlasting emotion which equalized everything, in which all manifestations of life had their proper place and proportion, according to which man could work in joy. She and he were accidents of the story. They might go out into darkness to-night; there was eternal time and multitudes of others to take their place, to feel the ancient, purifying fire--to love and have peace. CHAPTER XIX