t not hers?

Sometimes she rode out there, tying her horse to a tree in the lowest
field back of a great thicket of old-fashioned lilac bushes run wild,
where he was completely hidden from the rare passers-by of the rough
up-country road or lane. But oftenest, she has since confessed, she
would clear her morning or afternoon by some plausible excuse for
absence, then board the Waterbury trolley express, descending from it
about two miles from her nook, and walking or rather climbing up to it
crosslots through neglected woodland and uncropped pasture reverting to
the savage.

At one point she had to pass a small swampy meadow through which a mere
thread of stream worked its way, half-choked by thick-springing blades
of our native wild iris; so infinitely, so capriciously delicate in form
and hue. And here, if these were in bloom, she always lingered a while,
poised on the harsh hummocks of bent-grass, herself slender as a reed.
The pale, softly pencilled iris petals stirred in her a high wonder
beyond speech. What supreme, whimsical artistry brought them to being
there, in that lonely spot; and for whose joy? No human hand, cunning
with enamel and platinum and treated silver, could, after a lifetime of
patience, reproduce one petal of these uncounted flowers. Out of the
muck they lifted, ethereal, unearthly--yet so soon to die....

Oh, she knew what the learned had to say of them!--that they were merely
sexual devices; painted deceptions for attracting insects and so
assuring cross-pollination and the lusty continuance of their race. So
far as it went this was unquestionably true; but it went--just how far?
Their color and secret manna attracted the necessary insects, which they
fed; the form of their petals and perianth tubes, and the arrangement of
their organs of sex were cunningly evolved, so that the insect that
sought their nectar bore from one flower to the next its fertilizing
golden dust----

Astonishing, certainly! But what astonished her far more was that all
this ingenious mechanism should in any way affect _her_! It was
obviously none of her affair; and yet to come upon these cunning
mechanistic devices in this deserted field stirred her, set something
ineffable free in her--gave it joy for wings. It was as if these pale
blooms of wild iris had been for her, in a less mortal sense, what the
unconscious insects were for them--_intermediaries_, whose more ethereal
contacts cross-fertilized her very soul. B