Vina sat rigidly before her, wan and white-lipped as if her emotions were burned out.  Presently she began to talk again in her trailing pensive way: 

“I had been working deep and doggedly for days, hardly noticing who came in or out.  When the Grey One entered with him, I felt myself bobbing, whirling up into light surface water.  I hardly spoke the first half hour.  I remembered the night before, when he told that fine story straight into your eyes.  I thought him wonderful then, and it occurred to me that you were in for it.  But it was different when he came into my shop—­something intimate and important.  His eyes roved from one ‘Station’ to another, while the Grey One exploited me in her absurd, selfless fashion.  She’s a third in our trouble Beth.

“Presently he asked me how I knew the Christ had such wonderful hands; then he talked of the Forerunner and Saint Paul, who could have done so much, had they been there during the Passion, and of the women who were there.  It was strange to have him come into the studio—­to me—­with all these pictures developed through silent years.  It seems to me something tremendous must come of it...  Someone knocked, and frenziedly I ordered the intruder away, without opening the door.”

And now Vina repeated the belief of Bedient that impressed her so deeply:  that the Holy Spirit is the source of the divine principle in woman; that the Marys of this world are the symbols of that Mystic Motherhood—­the third of the Trinity—­which will bring the races of the world to God, as a woman brings children to her husband.

“Everything he said glowed with this message,” she went on.  “His every thought brought out that women are the holders of the spiritual loaf; that prophets are the sons of strength of great spiritual mothers; that artists and poets are prophets in the making, and that unto the purest and greatest of the prophets must come at last Godhood—­the Three in One; and of this Jesus is the Exemplar; His life and death and rising, His whole Mission, should make us see with human eyes, the Way of Truth.”

“I see, dear girl,” Beth said softly, “why you could not open the door to anyone...  Then the, Mission of Jesus was vicarious?  I had about given up hope of comprehending that.”

“Yes.  He lived and moved and bled and died and rose before the eyes of common men!” Vina exclaimed.  “One has to bleed for such eyes!  Without the living sacrifice, only the rare souls here and there, with the highest prophetic vision, could have risen clearly to understand these things....  Thus the growth of spirituality was quickened among the lowly multitudes.  The coming of the Christ is the loveliest manifestation of the divine feminine principle within Him—­the Holy Spirit.  Did he not become a Spiritual Mother of the world?  Was not Godhood the next step for such a finished Spirit?  His awful agony was that these tremendous mysteries of His illumination were enacted in the hideous low pressures of human understanding.  That he could endure this for the world’s eye, is his greatness, his Godhood!”