irl what she
wanted to be."

"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.

"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her
music. She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her
deeps--never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her
little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother--the
highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and
the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it
work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of
processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by
intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one
of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said--only
expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."

The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.

"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression
of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the
left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we
receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving
formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know
the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of
that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was
amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have,
who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an
arsenal of laws and fears."

"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"

"I haven't--at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as
instruction even."

"And spelling?"

"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she
is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading.
These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather
completely. God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the
real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page
manuscript without detriment to the reception of the same, all that
being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose
God-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world
with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection
to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from
children. But these are things which a man does with the back o