III
She did sing. Whereupon she was so happy too that she wept—a little bit. What had taken possession of her? For the first time she felt blindly content to relax to intuitions and emotions.
It was her last night in the dormitory room, where she had passed four beautiful years. Her roommate had already departed. Madelaine arose, her calm face suffused with a quiet glory. She turned on the lights.
On the dressing table the last of her effects lay for final packing in her bag on the morrow. Among them was a poem framed in a heavy copper border. It had hung above her study table the two years past. She had grown very intimate with that little news-print poem on its deep brown mapping.
Though she could repeat it perfectly, she read it again now, line by line and word by word:
“Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright
In some vast open space,
You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,
And triumph on your face.”
She sat for a quarter hour with the framed poem in her shapely fingers. Her eyes were looking through a million miles. Nathaniel Forge! Who was he? What had ever caused him to write such a poem?