“Another day is dying,” Missy began to write; then stopped.
The sun sank lower and lower, a reddening ball of sacred fire and, as if to catch from it a spark, Missy sat gazing at it as she chewed her pencil; but no words came to be caught down in pencilled tangibility. Oh, it hurt!—all this aching sweetness in her, surging through and through, and not able to bring out one word!
“Well?” enquired mother when, finally, she went back to the house.
Missy shook her head. Mother sighed; and Missy felt the sigh echoing in her own heart. Why were words, relatively so much less than inspiration, yet so important for inspiration's expression? And why were they so maddeningly elusive?
For a while, in her little white bed, she lay and stared hopelessly out at the street lamp down at the corner; the glow brought out a beautiful diffusive haze, a misty halo. “Only a signal shewn”...
The winking street lamp seemed to gaze back at her... “Sometimes a signal flashes from out the darkness”... “Only a look”... “But who can comprehend the unfathomable influence of a look?—It may come to a soul wounded and despairing—a soul caught in a wide-sweeping tempest—a soul sad and weary, longing to give up the struggle...”
Where did those words, ringing faintly in her consciousness, come from? She didn't know, was now too sleepy to ponder deeply. But they had come; that was a promising token. To-morrow more would come; the Valedictory would flow on out of her soul—or into her soul, whichever way it was—in phrases serene, majestic, ineffable.
Missy's eyelids fluttered; the street lamp's halo grew more and more irradiant; gleamed out to illumine, resplendently, a slender girl in white standing on a lighted stage, gazing with luminous eyes out on a darkened auditorium, a house as hushed as when little Eva dies. All the people were listening to the girl up there speaking—the rhythmic lift and fall of her voice, the sentiments fine and noble and inspiring:
“Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing... So, on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another... Only a look and a voice... But who can comprehend the unfathomable influence of a look?... which may come to a soul sad and weary, longing to give up the struggle...”
When she awoke next morning raindrops were beating a reiterative plaint against the window, and the sound seemed very beautiful. She liked lying in bed, staring out at the upper reaches of sombre sky. She liked it to be rainy when she woke up—there was something about leaden colour everywhere and falling rain that made you fit for nothing but placid staring, yet, at the same time, pleasantly meditative. Then was the time that the strange big things which filter through your dreams linger evanescently in your mind to ponder over.