I entered a picture-show one afternoon, some years later, and while watching the film “The Mothering Heart,” Lillian appeared on the screen. I instantly recognized her. Waiting for the return of the first reel, with the listing of the cast, I was not mistaken—her name was there.
Instilled into Lillian’s soul were some of the finest of human qualities: loyalty, moral courage, patience. Hers was beauty of spirit, beauty of thought, beauty of perfection, Christ-like beauty of innocence, of sinlessness; she was unspoiled, unselfish, meek.
She was never too busy to help, never too sad to smile, never too weighed down with care to glimpse a higher vision. When I think of her, it is like stepping through darkness into the light, for I have never known a more patient, gentle and lovable character, nor a more highly intellectual girl. Someone has said of her: “Hers is the charm of a vanishing strain of music, the haunting lyric that will neither satisfy, nor let you be—the fragrance of the flowers that perfume dreams.”
In word portraiture, it would be hard to find a more exquisite picture than this school-girl memory of Lillian at fourteen.
One other bit of evidence remains out of that Shawnee school life: Lillian’s “Botany Notebook”—a thick little book, and probably one of the neatest school-girl documents in existence. Every other page of it is covered with her small, meticulous writing, descriptive of plant growth, and facing each, a page of very careful pen-drawings of the “parts”—leaves, petals, rootlets, many of them delicately, daintily tinted. She took pride in her botany book, a pride not altogether out-grown to this day. Botany had been an antidote for that poisonous arithmetic and algebra.
XVI
IT SOUNDS LIKE HEAVEN
Lillian’s school-days were over. Just when she left Shawnee is not certain. She thinks she did not wait for the end of the term. She had finished the last page of her Botany Book, and believed she could struggle along without any more mathematics. Her mother in Springfield was working very hard—she could help.
And so the days of childhood had slipped by, and were gone. If we have taken a good many pages to tell of them, it is because most of the romance of life lies in its beginnings.
Mrs. Gish was truly working hard, but happily. Her employer, his health damaged by over-work, had turned over his comfortable home for her use and left Springfield for an indefinite period. Lillian remembers that her mother had taken up the rugs and laid down papers for them to walk on. To Nell: