But the Mill, with its smoking stacks and the steady song of its
industry, had no meaning for her. The dingy, dust-veiled Flats spoke a
language that she was not schooled to understand. The farms of the
valley beyond the river, so beautiful in their productiveness, were as
meaningless to her as the life on some unknown planet. To her the busy
city with its varied interests was without significance. The many homes
on the hillside held, for her, nothing. And yet as she looked she was
possessed of a curious feeling that everything in that world before her
eyes was occupied with some definite purpose--was living to some fixed
end--was a part of life--belonged to life. Below her, on the road at
the foot of the cliffs, an old negro with an ancient skeleton of a
horse and a shaky wreck of a wagon was making slow progress toward the
Flats. To Helen, even this poor creature was going somewhere--to some
definite place--on some definite mission. She felt strangely alone.
In those years of the war Adam Ward's daughter, like many thousands of
her class, had been inevitably forced into a closer touch with life
than she had ever known before. She had felt, as never before, the
great oneness of humanity. She had sensed a little the thrilling power
of a great human purpose.
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