And another night it came to him that he had something to say to the women of his people.  This thought emerged clean-cut from the deeps of abstraction, and he trembled before it, for his recent life had kept him far apart from women.  And now, the thought occurred that he was better prepared to inspire women—­because of this separateness.  He had preserved the boyish ideal of their glowing mystery, their lovely cosmic magnetism.  India had stimulated it.  All the lights of his mind had fallen upon this ideal, all the colors of the spectrum and many from heaven—­certain swift flashes of glory, such as are brought, in queer angles of light, from a butterfly’s wing.  He had been mercifully spared from moving among the infinitudes of small men who hold such a large estimate of the incapacity and commonness of women....  Even among the Sikh mothers (Bedient did not dream how his spirit prospered during these Indian years) his ideal was strengthened.  He found among the mothers of the Punjab a finer courage than ever the wars had shown him—­the courage that bends and bears—­and an answering sweetness for all the good that men brought to their feet....

So one night at last he found himself thanking God in the great silence—­that he could see the natural greatness of women; that he was alive to help them; that he could pity those who knew only the toiling, not the mystic, hands of women; pity those—­and tell them—­who knew her only as a sense creature....  And swiftly he wanted to tell women—­how high he held them—­that one man in the world had kept his vision of them brighter and brighter in substance and spirit.  He had the queer, almost feminine, sense, of their needing to know this, and of impatience to give them their happiness.  Perhaps they did not continually hold this in mind; perhaps the men of their world had taught them to forget....  They would be happier for his coming.  He would put into each woman’s heart—­as only a man could do—­a quickened sense of her incomparable importance; make her remember that mothering is the loveliest of all the arts; that only in the lower and savage orders of life the male is ascendant; that as the human race evolves in the finer regions of the spirit—­when growth becomes centred in the ethereal dimension of the soul—­woman, invariably a step nearer the great creative source, must assume supremacy....  Among the dark mountains the essence of all these thoughts came to him during many nights.

He would make women happier by restoring to them—­their own.  He must show how dreadful for them to forget for an instant—­that they are the real inspirers of man; that they ignite his every conception; that it is men who follow and interpret, and the clumsy world is to blame because the praise so often goes to the interpreter, and not to the inspiration.  But praise is a puny thing.  Women must see that they only are lovely who remain true to their dreams, for of their dreams is made the spiritual loaf, the