the steep swing of a bird down from the mountain to the infinite plains
below; the little flowers which were so contented each in its peaceful
place; the bees gathering food for their houses, and the stout beetles
who are always losing their way in the dusk. These things, and many
others, interested her. The three cows after they had grazed for a long
time would come and lie by her side and look at her as they chewed their
cud, and the goats would prance from the bracken to push their heads
against her breast because they loved her.

Indeed, everything in her quiet world loved this girl: but very slowly
there was growing in her consciousness an unrest, a disquietude to
which she had hitherto been a stranger. Sometimes an infinite weariness
oppressed her to the earth. A thought was born in her mind and it had
no name. It was growing and could not be expressed. She had no words
wherewith to meet it, to exorcise or greet this stranger who, more and
more insistently and pleadingly, tapped upon her doors and begged to
be spoken to, admitted and caressed and nourished. A thought is a real
thing and words are only its raiment, but a thought is as shy as a
virgin; unless it is fittingly apparelled we may not look on its shadowy
nakedness: it will fly from us and only return again in the darkness
crying in a thin, childish voice which we may not comprehend until, with
aching minds, listening and divining, we at last fashion for it those
symbols which are its protection and its banner. So she could not
understand the touch that came to her from afar and yet how intimately,
the whisper so aloof and yet so thrillingly personal. The standard of
either language or experience was not hers; she could listen but not
think, she could feel but not know, her eyes looked forward and did not
see, her hands groped in the sunlight and felt nothing. It was like the
edge of a little wind which stirred her tresses but could not lift them,
or the first white peep of the dawn which is neither light nor darkness.
But she listened, not with her ears but with her blood. The fingers of
her soul stretched out to clasp a stranger's hand, and her disquietude
was quickened through with an eagerness which was neither physical nor
mental, for neither her body nor her mind was definitely interested.
Some dim region between these grew alarmed and watched and waited and
did not sleep or grow weary at all.

One morning she lay among the long, warm grasses. She