To let God make us, instead of painfully trying to make ourselves; to
follow the path that his love shows us, instead of through conceit or
cowardice or mockery choosing another; to trust Him for our strength
and fitness as the flowers do, simply giving ourselves back to Him in
grateful service,--this is to keep the laws that give us the freedom
of the city in which there is no longer any night of bewilderment or
ignorance or uncertainty. So the woman who had lived a life of
bondage, whose hardest task-master was herself, and the woman who had
been both taught and inspired to hold fast her freedom, sat side by
side: the one life having been blighted because it lacked its mate,
and was but half a life in itself; while the other, fearing to give
half its royalty or to share its bounty, was being tempted to cripple
itself, and to lose its strait and narrow way where God had left no
room for another.
For as the play went on and the easily pleased audience laughed and
clapped its hands, and the tired players bowed and smiled from behind
the flaring foot-lights, there was one spectator who was conscious of
a great crisis in her own life, which the mimicry of that evening
seemed to ridicule and counterfeit. And though Nan smiled with the
rest, and even talked with her neighbors while the tawdry curtain had
fallen, it seemed to her that the coming of Death at her life's end
could not be more strange and sudden than this great barrier which had
fallen between her and her girlhood, the dear old life which had kept
her so unpuzzled and safe.
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