ch. From her father she had inherited a rare
faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness
and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and
forceful phrasing. Her father wrote of her gift:

Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket-
like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. I
seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of
colored fire.

We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that
winter.

She was more at home than the others. Her health did not permit her to
go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. They
discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life,
philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. He
recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the
mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain
phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of
the open that one feels in "the days when we went gipsying a long time
ago" and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested
by the simple words, "departed this life." Both Susy and her father
cared more for Joan than any of the former books. To Mr. Rogers, Clemens
wrote:

"Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for
love." A memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but
himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it.

Do you know that shock? I mean when you come at your regular hour
into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the
medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed
stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the
room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has
happened.

Do you know that shock?

The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning
after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the
printer. He steps into his study at the hour established by the
habit of months--& he gets that little shock. All the litter &
confusion are gone. The piles of dusty reference-books are gone
from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters,
manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs,
tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the