All these things around her, men and women had called real; but to her they seemed very unreal. She had been brought into the world and set down among them without a voice or a hand in the making. Reality, this? Far from it. Why, the very food they ate was not what it seemed, the roof overhead but a creation, and for all she knew her own clothing might be the merest makeshift as against a real, a truly penetrating eye. These, then, were but resulting products, and of what? Ideality? Her own soul cried aloud for something better, purer, and more certain than all these sordid trappings of man's little endeavor. There must be an ethereal, a state transfixed--of earth, but infinite--and could she only resolve its quantity the elements had afforded a way; the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth and all that there is upon it were but the atoms of an endless progression, fixed and apportioned by the same compelling, abiding agency that had touched her and bound her when confronted with a natural and unhindered attraction. The mountain-top hung high above: she wanted to get there, to some place far away from vulgar witnessing, and there seek communion with the spirit that seemed so near yet nowhere within reach. Man had brought forth nothing not deceptive, failed utterly of conception--a province wholly within the grasp of woman, the more her reason. Having at last resolved to press the quest alone and untrammelled, Yodogima ran out and along the narrow veranda to the long, smooth-worn steps that wound up and around the mountain-side to its summit in the background. The climb was not a hard one, and as she went she remarked the usefulness to which the hand of man really had been put. Yet there seemed a want of guidance, and upon arriving at a deserted temple the poverty of his understanding became the more painfully apparent. History recorded ages and cycles of crowding and striving and yet how much had been done to show that anything more than nature had inhabited this earth? A few houses, here and there a crooked, stumbling highway, now and then a ship at sea, all temporary, and so little of beauty! Really it seemed a pity that so much good rich blood and vain high sounding words had been expended upon nothing more than barely living: then, approaching the summit, nearer and nearer, his track or touch began to disappear, presently became extinct, and no such delight had entered her heart, save once before. Heaven, limitless and real, encouraging the utmost within her, seemed a thing of consequence; and the earth receding and vanishing and lost, with its humdrum and vanity but an atom engulfed, were as if a memory-disappearing and forgotten over against the invisible grind of a molten, seething yesterday.