Like a strong and beneficent magician, she built up again and illuminated Sylvia’s black and shattered world.  “Your father is just as pure a man as I am a woman, and I would be ashamed to look any child of mine in the face if he were not.  You know no men who are not decent—­except two—­and those you did not meet in your parents’ home.”

For the first time she moved from her commanding attitude of prophetic dignity.  She came closer to Sylvia, but although she looked at her with a sudden sweetness which affected Sylvia like a caress, she but made one more impersonal statement:  “Sylvia dear, don’t let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they’re just as decent.  Life isn’t worth living unless you know that—­and it’s true.”  Apparently she had said all she had to say, for she now kissed Sylvia gently and began again to walk forward.

The sun had completely set, and the piled-up clouds on the horizon flamed and blazed.  Sylvia stood still, looking at them fixedly.  The great shining glory seemed reflected from her heart, and cast its light upon a regenerated world—­a world which she seemed to see for the first time.  Strange, in that moment of intensely personal life, how her memory was suddenly flooded with impersonal impressions of childhood, little regarded at the time and long since forgotten, but now recurring to her with the authentic and uncontrovertible brilliance which only firsthand experiences in life can bring with them—­all those families of her public-school mates, the plain, ugly homes in and out of which she had come and gone, with eyes apparently oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh.  All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast.  She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the people she knew so well from long observation of their lives, whose mediocre, struggling existence had filled her with scornful pity, but whom now she recalled with a great gratitude for the explicitness of the revelations made by their untutored plainness.  For all she could ever know, the Drapers and the Fiskes and the others of their world might be anything, under the discreet reticence of their sophistication; but they did not make up all the world.  She knew, from having breathed it herself, the wind of health which blew about those other lives, bare and open to the view, as less artless lives were not.  There was some other answer to the riddle, beside Mrs. Draper’s.