could not be
otherwise. She looked at Eugene's case, as she had at many a similar
one, being sure, in her earnest way, that she, by realizing his ultimate
fundamental spirituality, could bring him out of his illusions, and make
him see the real spirituality of things, in which the world of flesh and
desire had no part.

"Beloved," she loved to quote to him, "now are we the sons of God, and
it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall
appear"--(and she explained that _he_ was this universal spirit of
perfection of which we are a part)--"we shall be like him; for we shall
see him as He is."

"And every man that has this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is
pure."

She once explained to him that this did not mean that the man must
purify himself by some hopeless moral struggle, or emaciating
abstinance, but rather that the fact that he had this hope of something
better in him, would fortify him in spite of himself.

"You laugh at me," she said to him one day, "but I tell you you are a
child of God. There is a divine spark in you. It must come out. I know
it will. All this other thing will fall away as a bad dream. It has no
reality."

She even went so far in a sweet motherly way as to sing hymns to him,
and now, strange to relate, her thin voice was no longer irritating to
him, and her spirit made her seemingly beautiful in his eyes. He did not
try to adjust the curiosities and anomalies of material defects in so
far as she was concerned. The fact that her rooms were anything but
artistically perfect; that her body was shapeless, or comparatively so,
when contrasted with that standard of which he had always been so
conscious; the fact that whales were accounted by her in some weird way
as spiritual, and bugs and torturesome insects of all kinds as
emanations of mortal mind, did not trouble him at all. There was
something in this thought of a spiritual universe--of a kindly universe,
if you sought to make it so, which pleased him. The five senses
certainly could not indicate the totality of things; beyond them must
lie depths upon depths of wonder and power. Why might not this act? Why
might it not be good? That book that he had once read--"The World
Machine"--had indicated this planetary life as being infinitesimally
small; that from the point of view of infinity it was not even
thinkable--and yet here it appeared to be so large. Why might it not be,
as Carlyle had said, a state of