“There is the great polar star,” she said to herself, “there are all the suns and stars, here is the earth, and here am I, Maria Edgham, who am on the earth, but must some day give up my mortal life and become a part of it, and part of the material universe and perhaps also of the spiritual.  I am as nothing, and yet this pain in my heart, this love in my heart, makes me shine with my own fire as much as the star.  I could not be unless the earth existed, but it is of such as myself that the earth is made up, and without such as myself it could not shine in its place in the heavens.”

Maria began to attach a certain importance to her individual existence even while she realized the pettiness of it, comparatively speaking.  She was an infinitesimal part, but the whole could not be without that part.  Suddenly the religious instruction which she had drank in with her mother’s milk took possession of her, but she had a breadth of outlook which would have terrified her mother.  Maria said to herself that she believed in God, but that His need of her was as much as her need of Him.  She said to herself that without her tiny faith in Him, her tiny speck of love for Him, He would lack something of Himself.  Then all at once, in a perfect flood of rapture, something which she had never before known came into her heart:  the consciousness of the love of God for herself, of the need of God for herself, poor little Maria Edgham, whose ways of life had been so untoward and so absurd that she almost seemed to herself something to be laughed at rather than pitied, much less loved.  But all at once the knowledge of the love of God was over her.  She gazed up again at the great polar star overlooking with its eternal light the mysteries of the north, and for the first time in her whole life the primitive instinct of worship asserted itself within her.  Maria rose, and fell on her knees, and continued to gaze up at the star which seemed to her like an eye of God Himself, and love seemed to pervade her whole being.  She thought now almost lightly of Wollaston Lee.  What was any earthly love to love like this, which took hold of the beginning and end of things, of the eternal?  A resolution which this sense of love seemed to inspire came over her.  It was a resolution almost grotesque, but it was sacred because her heart of hearts was in it, and she made it because of this love of God for her and her new sense of worship for something beyond the earth and all earthly affections which had taken possession of her.  She rose, undressed herself, and went to bed.  She did not say any prayer as usual.  She seemed an incarnate prayer which made formulas unnecessary.  Why was it essential to say anything when she was?  At last she fell asleep, and did not wake until the dawn light was in the room.  She did not wake as usual to a reunion with herself, but to a reunion with another self.  She did not feel altogether happy.  The resolution of the night before remained, but the ecstasy had vanished.