Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery.  There are women’s faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite purity and love.  I remember two faces of women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra Angelico,—­and I just now came across a print of Raphael’s Santa Apollina, with something of the same quality,—­which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above ours.  No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of Heaven!  The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no women to be worshipped.

But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it.  Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.  But this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression.  Can she tell me anything?

Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I have tired of, and through—­Hush!  Is the door fast?  Talking loud is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.

You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of and to use for a special illustration.  Riding along over a rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.  There is a great hollow under your feet,—­a huge unsunned cavern.  Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.

So it is in life.  We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul’s highway,—­now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.  Suddenly we hear the deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.

I wish the girl would go.  I don’t like to look at her so much, and yet I cannot help it.  Always that same expression of something that I ought to know,—­something that she was made to tell and I to hear,—­lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.