to that large class whose eyes
are holden.

"And the book itself? Is it nearly finished?"

Hester's face changed. Eagerly, shyly, enthusiastically she talked to
her friend about the book, as a young girl talks of her lover.
Everything else was forgotten. Hester's eyes burned. Her color came and
went. She was transfigured.

The protecting, anxious affection died out of Rachel's face as she
looked at Hester, and gave place to a certain wistful, half-envious
admiration. She had once been shaken by all these emotions herself,
years ago, when she was in love. She had regarded them as a revelation
while they lasted; and afterwards, as a steep step--a very steep
step--upon the stair of life. But she realized now that such as Hester
live constantly in the world which the greater number of us can only
enter when human passion lends us the key; the world at which, when the
gates are shut against us, the coarser minded among us are not ashamed
to level their ridicule and contempt.

Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some
mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself. She saw it
complete, beautiful--an entrancing vision, inaccessible, as a sunset.

"I cannot reach up to it. I cannot get near it," she said. "When I try
to write it, it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of
charcoal. I understate everything. Yet I labor day by day travestying
it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind. I make
everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words. I go alone
into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees. And
gradually I understand and know. And I listen, and Nature speaks, really
speaks--not a _facon de parler_, as some people think who explain to you
that you mean this or that by your words which you don't mean--and her
spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again
misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander
so far away from her that every white anemone and every seedling fern
disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among
them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the
night, to find words to translate it into. But there are no words, or,
if there are, I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some
coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down. And, oh! Rachel, the
worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have