ow."

"I shall make a point of telling him you want him." But even that could
strike no spark from her. She was too completely at odds with life to
care. I realized, too, after an hour's talk with her, that I had better
go--take back my fine proposition about making a long visit. She reacted
to nothing I could offer. I talked of books and plays, visiting
virtuosos and picture exhibitions. Her comments were what they would
always have been, except that she was already groping for the cue. She
had been out of it for months; she had given up the fight. The best
things she said sounded a little stale and precious. Her wit perished in
the face of Nature's stare. Nature was a lady she didn't recognize: a
country cousin she'd never met. She couldn't even "sit and play with
similes." If she lived, she would be an old lady with a clever past: an
intolerable bore. But there was no need to look so far ahead. Kathleen
Somers would die.

Before dinner I clambered up or down (I don't remember which) to a brook
and gathered a bunch of wild iris for her. She had loved flowers of old;
and how deftly she could place a spray among her treasures! She
shuddered. "Take those things away! How dare you bring It inside the
house?" By "It" I knew she meant the wild natural world. Obediently I
took the flowers out and flung them over the fence. I knew that Kathleen
Somers was capable of getting far more pleasure from their inimitable
hue than I; but even that inimitable hue was poisoned for her because it
came from the world that was torturing her--the world that beat upon her
windows, so that she turned her back to the day; that stormed her ears,
so that she closed them even to its silence; that surrounded her, so
that she locked every gate of her mind.

I left, that afternoon, very desolate and sorry. Certainly I could do
nothing for her. I had tried to shock her, stir her, into another
attitude, but in vain. She had been transplanted to a soil her tender
roots could not strike into. She would wither for a little under the
sky, and then perish. "If she could only have fallen in love!" I
thought, as I left her, huddled in her wicker chair. If I had been a
woman, I would have fled from Melora Meigs even into the arms of a
bearded farmer; I would have listened to the most nasal male the hills
had bred. I would have milked cows, to get away from Melora. But I am a
crass creature. Besides, what son of the soil would want her:
unexuberant, delicat