ty again, out of her own youth.
She was not dreaming now, but she knew instinctively how it had been in
those last days of the Vestals' existence, and wished every pillar, and
angle, and cornice, and ornament back, each into its own place and
unchanged, and herself, where she was, in full consciousness of life and
thought, at the very moment when she had first seen the man's face and
had understood that one may vow away the dying body but not the
deathless soul. That had been the beginning of her being alive. Before
that, she had been as a flower, growing by the universal will, one of
those things that are created pure and beautiful and fragrant from the
first without thought or merit of their own; and then, as a young bird
in the nest, high in air, in a deep forest, in early summer, looking out
and wondering, but not knowing yet, its little heart beating fast with
only one instinct, to be out and alone on the wing. But afterwards all
had changed instantly and knowledge had come without learning, because
what was to make it was already present in subtle elements that needed
only the first breath of understanding to unite themselves in an ordered
and perfect meaning; as the electric spark, striking through invisible
mingled gases, makes perfect union of them in crystal drops of water.

That had been the beginning, since conscious life begins in the very
instant when the soul is first knowingly answerable for the whole
being's actions, in the light of good and evil, and first asks the only
three questions which human reason has never wholly answered, which are
as to knowledge, and duty, and hope.

Who shall say that life, in that sense, may not begin in a dream, as
well as in what we call reality? What is a dream? Sometimes a wandering
through a maze of absurdities, in which we feel as madmen must,
believing ourselves to be other beings than ourselves, conceiving the
laws of nature to be reversed for our advantage or our ruin, seeing
right as wrong and wrong as right, in the pathetic innocence of the
idiot or the senseless rage of the maniac, convinced beyond all argument
that the absolutely impossible is happening before our eyes, yet never
in the least astonished by any wonders, though subject to terrors we
never feel when we are awake. Has no one ever understood that confused
dreaming must be exactly like the mental state of the insane, and that
if we dreamed such dreams with open eyes, we should be raving mad, or
hop