This young wife had greatness in her. Domestic servant though she certainly had been, she was distinguished in her very bones. A clear ray of mental guidance and intuition ran like a gleam behind all her little blunders of speech and action. To her, it was right and natural, for instance, that her husband’s money should mostly be sent away to help those who were without it. “We’re much better this way,” she remarked lightly, remembering, perhaps, the life of detailed and elaborate selfishness she once had served, “and anyhow I can’t wear two dresses at the same time, can I? Or live in two houses--what’s the good of all that? But for those who like it,” she added, “I expect it’s right enough. They need it--to learn, or something. I’ve been in families of the best that didn’t want for anything--but really they had nothing at all.” It was in the little things I caught the attitude. Although conditions here made it impossible to test it, I had more and more the impression, too, that she possessed insight into the causes of human frailty, and understood temptations she could not possibly have experienced personally in this present life.
An infallible sign of younger souls was their pursuit hot-foot of pleasure and sensation, of power, fame, ambition. The old souls leave all that aside; they have known its emptiness too often. Their hall-mark lies in spiritual discernment, the power to choose between the permanent and the transitory. Brains and intellect were no criterion of development at all. And I reflected with a smile how the “educated” and “social” world would close its doors to such a woman--the common world of younger, cruder souls, insipid and undistinguished, many of them but just beyond the animal stage--the “upper classes”! The Kingdom of Heaven lies within, I remembered, and the meek and lowly shall inherit the “earth.”
And the “Dog-Man” also rose before me in another light--this slow-minded, instinctive being whom elsewhere I should doubtless have dismissed as “stupid.” His approximation to the instinctive animal life became so clear. In his character and essential personality lay the curious suggestion. Out of his frank gaze peered the mute and searching appeal of the soul awakening into self-consciousness--a look of direct and simple sincerity, often questioning, often poignant. The interval between Mrs. LeVallon and himself was an interval of countless lives. How welcome to him would be the support of a thought-out religious creed, to her how useless! The different stages individuals occupy, how far apart, how near, how various! I felt it all as true, and the effect of this calm valley upon me was not sympathy with Nature only, but a certain new sympathy with all the world. It was very wonderful.