ut she could not define for
herself or express for others what they did to her. Of one thing only
she was certain: These fleeting moments of expansion, of illumination,
were brief and vague--moments of pure, uncritical feeling--but they were
the best moments of her life; and they were real. They vanished, but not
wholly. They left lasting traces. Never to have been visited by them
would have condemned her, she knew, to be less than her fullest self,
narrower in sympathy, more rigid, more dogmatic, and less complete.

But that first May day of her discovery, when called out to wander
lonely as a cloud by the spirit of spring--the day she had happened on
her magic circle,--all that rough upland world was burgeoning, and the
beauty of those deserted fields hurt the heart. Susan never easily wept,
but that day--safely hidden in the magic circle, then newly hers--she
threw herself down on the ghost-gray moss among the spicy tufts of sweet
fern and enjoyed, as she later told me, the most sensuously abandoned
good cry of her life. The dogwood trees were a glory of flushed white
about her, shining in on every hand through the black-green cedars, as
if the stars had rushed forward toward earth and clustered more thickly
in a nearer midnight sky. Life had no right to be so overwhelmingly
fair--if these poignant gusts of beauty gave no sanction to all that the
bruised heart of man might long for of peace and joy! If life must be
accepted as an idiot's tale, signifying nothing, then it was a
refinement of that torture that it could suddenly lift--as a sterile
wave lifts only to break--to such dizzying, ecstatic heights.... No,
no--it was impossible! It was unthinkable! It was absurd!

That year we spent July, August, and early September in France, but late
September found us back in New Haven for those autumnal weeks which are
the golden, heady wine of our New England cycle. Praise of the New
England October, for those who have experienced it, must always seem
futile, and for those who have not, exaggerated and false. Summer does
not decay in New England; it first smoulders and then flares out in a
clear multicolored glory of flame; it does not sicken to corruption, it
shouts and sings and is transfigured. I had suggested to Susan,
therefore, a flight to higher hills--to the Berkshires, to be
precise--where we might more spaciously watch these smoke-less
frost-fires flicker up, spread, consume themselves, and at last leap
from the