So February sped along and the spring of 1920 approached. The warm round crystal called earth made its way through the interstellar spaces and tipped its darkened pole into the sun’s rays. The ice began to melt, keeping its chill to the last lump. Everything else began to expand a little, as if softly burning. Inert snails and frogs and buds began to swell. The pussywillows came forth in gray velvet and stood near each other like bashful lovers, for male and female created He them.
Presently the hidden fires began to glow pink in arbutus among the pines, and ran like blue flame along the shore in violets, and then to fill the upland woods with the frank conflagration of adder’s tongue. Jean went about feeling fire of every imaginable temperature.
She delighted to call it out of all sorts of things in her laboratory and out of doors. With a bit of steel she struck fire from every part of her island. And having abandoned the impossible task of playing the elements on her little old rosewood piano, she contented herself with making up a melody for some words of Browning:
Fire is in the flint: true, once a spark escapes,
Fire forgets the kinship, soars till fancy shapes
Some befitting cradle where the babe had birth—
Wholly heaven’s product, unallied to earth.
Splendors recognized as perfect in the star!—
In our flint their home was, housed as now they are.