all performed their healthful task, all would sleep
peacefully at night. She herself had felt the beneficent power of work
in the midst of her sufferings and her grief. Since he had taught her to
employ every one of her hours; since she had been a mother, especially,
occupied constantly with her child, she no longer felt a chill of
horror when she thought of the Unknown. She put aside without an effort
disquieting reveries; and if she still felt an occasional fear, if
some of her daily griefs made her sick at heart, she found comfort and
unfailing strength in the thought that her child was this day a day
older, that he would be another day older on the morrow, that day
by day, page by page, his work of life was being accomplished. This
consoled her delightfully for all her miseries. She had a duty, an
object, and she felt in her happy serenity that she was doing surely
what she had been sent here to do.

Yet, even at this very moment she knew that the mystic was not entirely
dead within her. In the midst of the profound silence she heard a slight
noise, and she raised her head. Who was the divine mediator that
had passed? Perhaps the beloved dead for whom she mourned, and whose
presence near her she fancied she could divine. There must always be
in her something of the childlike believer she had always been, curious
about the Unknown, having an instinctive longing for the mysterious.
She accounted to herself for this longing, she even explained it
scientifically. However far science may extend the limits of human
knowledge, there is undoubtedly a point which it cannot pass; and it
was here precisely that Pascal placed the only interest in life--in
the effort which we ceaselessly make to know more--there was only one
reasonable meaning in life, this continual conquest of the unknown.
Therefore, she admitted the existence of undiscovered forces surrounding
the world, an immense and obscure domain, ten times larger than the
domain already won, an infinite and unexplored realm through which
future humanity would endlessly ascend. Here, indeed, was a field vast
enough for the imagination to lose itself in. In her hours of reverie
she satisfied in it the imperious need which man seems to have for the
spiritual, a need of escaping from the visible world, of interrogating
the Unknown, of satisfying in it the dream of absolute justice and of
future happiness. All that remained of her former torture, her last
mystic transports,