“How—how do you do it?” she asked.
“What?” asked Margaret.
“Write?” said Emily, holding to Margaret tight—she had never before thus laid bare the secrets of her soul.
“Oh,” said Margaret, and her lips parted and her face lighted as she and Emily gazed into each other’s eyes, “you just feel it and then you write.”
There was a time when Emily would have asked, “Feel what?” “It” as used by Margaret was indefinite, but Emily understood. You just feel it and then you write.
In her study hour Emily took her pencil and, with Latin Grammar as barrier and blind to an outside world, bent over her paper. She did not speak them, those whispers hunting the rhyme: she only felt them, and they spoke.
She did not know, she did not dream that she was finding the use, the purpose for it all, these years of the climb toward knowledge. Some day it would dawn on her that we only garner to give out.
Creare—creatum, she had repeated in class from her Latin Grammar, but she did not understand the meaning then. In the beginning God made, and Man is in the image of God. She had found the answer to her discontent; for to create, to give out, is the law.
She wrote on, head bent, cheek flushed, leaning absorbed above the paper in her book.
On the way home she whispered that which had written itself, while her feet kept time to the rhythm. It was Beautiful and Sad, and it was True: