●   ●   ●    metaphysical issues that reached into the future. Even as the author wrote of her second marriage and her early separation from her son, she could break off—with a kind of indignation at the fraudulence of mortal life—to remind the reader that “material” history is a record of dreams, a play of shadows: Mere historic incidents and personal events are frivolous and of no moment, unless they illustrate the ethics of Truth.