highest compliment
the devout can pay, would the theologians but acknowledge it.

The sun slipped slower down the field of the sky, now a pale green as
delicate as the leaves burgeoning beneath it, and Loveday drew herself
up in a bunch, knees to chin, her brown strong hands clasped and her
slim feet curved over the slope of the smooth granite. The wood below
was wrapping itself in mystery, and her eyes attempted to fathom its
fastnesses. Ordinarily, she was fearful of venturing into the darkness
under the trees when once the evening had fallen, and it was then she
was accustomed to come out up to her boulder, but this evening she was
strung to any courage, for she walked in that certainty which on rare
occasions comes to all--the certainty of being immune to danger--which
is of all sensations vouchsafed to mortals the most godlike.

She rose to her feet, and swinging herself down from the rock, began the
descent, ledge by ledge, to the shadows below. A last spring, and she
was standing on the dark gold of drifted leaves, that rose about her
ankles with a dry little rustling. It was the wood's caress of greeting,
and she did not reflect that it was also the kisses of the dead.

Indeed, she clapped her hands in the rush of strength she felt, both in
her young muscles and her leaping spirit, and stood proudly listening
to the echo dying away, unaffrighted. She was young and strong and
beautiful; life, not dead leaves, lay at her feet. She was different,
and in her difference lay power, she was at last herself, Loveday ...
she was Loveday, Loveday ... Loveday...

She darted hither and thither through the wood, noting with a pleasure
keener than ever before how soft and sleek the moss was to her feet, how
silky the flank of the beech to her leaning cheek, how sweetly sharp the
intimate evening note of the birds.

And she was quite unfitted to be the goddess of these rustic beauties,
for all her mind could feel in that softness and sleekness and clear
calling was their alikeness to artificiality. She felt thin slippers
on her feet, rubbed an ecstatic cheek against the sheen of satin, and
in her ears echoed no diviner music than the Tol-de-rol Tol-de-rol
of the Bugletown band on Flora Day. Save in her sincerity, she was as
artificial a goddess as ever graced a Versailles Fete Champetre. What
were leaf and bird to her but the stuff of her life, whereas white satin
gleamed with the shimmer of the very heavens!

Hers was