if one may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare, an economic
factor controlling the census returns. Her gift of motherhood is
stranger than that, and includes spiritual affinities and significances
not entirely represented by visible babes. Her motherhood is mysterious
because it seems to be one with the universal motherhood of nature, one
with the motherhood that guards and warms to life the eggs in the nest
and the seeds in the hollows of the hills, the motherhood of the whole
strange vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves and dreams and
breaks into song and flower. And, as nature is something more than a
mother, so is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible sign of an
inward and spiritual grace and goodness at the heart of life; and her
beauty is the sacred seal which the gods have set upon her in token of
her supernatural meaning and mission; for all beauty is the message of
the immortal to mortality. Always when man has been in doubt concerning
his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his destiny, his heart has
been revived by some beatific vision;

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the darkness of the world.




III

THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES