Stand on the other side of the cot and put your hand in mine. I ask
you for the last time, will you give this unfinished, imperfect life
into my keeping, if I promise to be faithful to it unto the end,
whatever it may be?'
I suppose that every human creature, be he ever so paltry, has his
hour of effulgence, an hour when the mortal veil grows thin and the
divine image stands revealed, endowing him, for a brief space at
least with a kind of awful beauty and majesty.
It was Mistress Mary's hour. Her pure, unswerving spirit shone with
a white and steady radiance that illuminated Mrs. Grubb's soul to its
very depths, showing her in a flash the feeble flickerings and
waverings of her own trivial purposes. At that moment her eye was
fitted with a new lens, through which the road to the summit of the
Tehachapi Mountains and Mahatmadom suddenly looked long, weary, and
profitless, and by means of which the twins were transferred from the
comfortable middle distance they had previously occupied to the
immediate foreground of duty. The lens might slip, but while it was
in place she saw as clearly as another woman.
'Will you?' repeated Mistress Mary, wondering at her silence.
Mrs. Grubb gave one last glance at the still reproach of Lisa's face,
and one more at the twins, who seemed to loom more formidably each
time she regarded them; then drawing a deep breath she said, 'Yes, I
will; I WILL, no matter what happens; but it isn't enough to give up,
and you needn't suppose I think it is.
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