letely set, and the piled-up clouds on the horizon
flamed and blazed. Sylvia stood still, looking at them fixedly. The
great shining glory seemed reflected from her heart, and cast its
light upon a regenerated world--a world which she seemed to see for
the first time. Strange, in that moment of intensely personal life,
how her memory was suddenly flooded with impersonal impressions of
childhood, little regarded at the time and long since forgotten,
but now recurring to her with the authentic and uncontrovertible
brilliance which only firsthand experiences in life can bring with
them--all those families of her public-school mates, the plain, ugly
homes in and out of which she had come and gone, with eyes apparently
oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording
life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like
a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom
she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced,
kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned
air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring
wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the
farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the
people she knew so well from long observation of their lives, whose
mediocre, struggling existence had filled her with scornful pity, but
whom now she recalled with a great gratitude for the explicitness of
the revelations made by their untutored plainness. For all she could
ever know, the Drapers and the Fiskes and the others of their
world might be anything, under the discreet reticence of their
sophistication; but they did not make up all the world. She knew, from
having breathed it herself, the wind of health which blew about those
other lives, bare and open to the view, as less artless lives were
not. There was some other answer to the riddle, beside Mrs. Draper's.

Sylvia was only eighteen years old and had the childish immaturity of
her age, but her life had been so ordered that she was not, even at
eighteen, entirely in the helpless position of a child who must depend
on the word of others. She had accumulated, unknown to herself, quite
apart from polished pebbles of book-information, a small treasury
of living seeds of real knowledge of life, taken in at first-hand,
knowledge of which no one could deprive her. The realization of this
was a steadying ballast which righted the wildl