Or my poor, careless heart, maybe,
Could not have told from spring to spring,
Why we so long went wandering!
Saddest of all is not to know!
My little love of long ago.”
Esther was radiant with joy. She sped over the ground like a wild young deer, running to the house for her long-forsaken violin. She carried it to the back of the orchard. She propped the music up in the low fork of an apple tree, and wrestled with the opening bars. It was written in a minor key and was the most difficult accompaniment she had ever seen. Over and over again she tried to bring out the plaintive harmony that was there. She had to give it up at last—it was beyond her reach—it challenged her. This caused her flickering ambition to flash up anew.
A new resolve glowed in her eyes. To be thwarted in a thing was touching upon an acutely sensitive nerve. She would not rest until she had beaten down every obstacle between her and her hope of attainment. She would free herself of these maddeningly narrow surroundings.
Glenn Andrews immediately answered her letter, found upon his arrival in New York. He said:
“You have lived among the flowers, had great grief, and now the flowers do not console you. And yet, if you only knew it, nature is a thousand times better at consolation than human beings. I long ago gave up looking for consolation from people—I can get it from flowers. Maybe it is because I don’t live among them. In lieu of flowers, I take work, and the grind I go through takes the edge off griefs, joys and ambitions. It reduces one to the dead level of passiveness, which is not ecstatic, but which does not hurt. So I might say to you: ‘If the flowers do not console you, try work’—but, doubtless, you have been working. I know that you are capable of it. Perhaps time has worn off the brunt of your sorrow and you are feeling the after pain of loneliness—which is even worse to bear, because less vivid and more constant.
“You ought to do something some day with your art. If you only know it, you are not unfortunately situated as regards your future. Try and look at it that way. Lift up your head and throw your shoulders back. Go and look in the looking-glass and make a face at yourself, and remember you are not an editor, that your nose is not on the grind-stone and that you have, after all, something to thank God for.”