Monkey and her guide raced on
alone into the very room where he now sat up and rubbed his eyes in
the Citadelle. He was telling his mother that he had just been
'dreaming extraordinary.' But Mother, sleeping like a fossil monster
in the Tertiary strata, heard him not.
'He often goes like that,' whispered Monkey in a tone of proud
superiority. 'He's only a little boy really, you see.'
But the sight they then witnessed was not what they expected.
For Mademoiselle Lemaire herself was working over Mother like an
engine, and Mother was still sleeping like the dead. The radiance that
emanated from the night-body of this suffering woman, compared to
their own, was as sunlight is to candle-light. Its soft glory was
indescribable, its purity quite unearthly, and the patterns that it
wove lovely beyond all telling. Here they surprised her in the act,
busy with her ceaseless activities for others, working for the world
by _thinking_ beauty. While her pain-racked body lay asleep in the bed
it had not left for thirty years, nor would ever leave again this side
of death, she found her real life in loving sympathy for the pain of
others everywhere. For thought is prayer, and prayer is the only true
effective action that leaves no detail incomplete. She _thought_ light
and glory into others.
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