every act. The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted,
if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which
they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad,
the energy which upheld them was all of God. That devil, too, that he
saw standing close by and whispering to them--his form was dim and
fading; he was not sure whether he was a reality or a thought, but--if
he had life, was it his own? Somewhere, he could not remember where or
when, he had heard the voice of truth saying, "Thou couldst have no
power against me except it were given thee from above."

The strange complexity of dreams, which seems so foolish, brings them
nearer to reality than we suppose, for there is nothing real which has
not manifold meanings. Before this vision of his townspeople faded, Bart
saw Ann slowly walk over from the group in which she had risen to be a
queen, to that group whose members were worn with disappointment and
age; as she went he saw her perfectly as he had never seen her before,
the hard shallow thoughts that were woven in with her unremitting effort
to do always the thing that she had set herself to do; and he saw, too,
a nature that was beneath this outer range of activity, a small
trembling fountain of feeling suppressed and shut from the light. In
some strange way as she stood, having grown older by transition from one
group to the other, he saw that this inner fountain of strength was
increasing and overflowing all that other part which had before made up
almost the entire personality of the woman. This change did not take
place visibly in the other people among whom she stood. It was in Ann he
saw the change. He felt very glad he had seen this; he seemed to think
of nothing else for a long time.

He forgot then all the detail of that which he had seen and thought, and
it seemed to him that he spent a long time just rejoicing in the divine