The clouds on the hills, the buzz of bees in the clover, the sabre swing of poplar trees against the sky, moved her to song, and she wrote daily with marvelous ease. She flung herself prone on the bank by the spring, and strove to mix and be one with the wind and the trees. She thought of her childish crooning over Carl that day his head lay in her lap, and its significance came to her and voiced itself in music.
She traced out every path where her feet had trod as a child, and the infinite significance and terror and high beauty of life and death came upon her. She seemed to summon up and analyze all her past, as if she were about to end one life and begin another. These wonderful moods and memories in some unaccountable way co-ordinated themselves in lines of verse, and the restless, vigorous heart of the girl felt the splendid peace which comes when the artist finds at last that art which is verily his.
The body of her verse grew, and she longed for Mason's opinion upon it, and yet she feared to send it, it seemed so different from other verse. At times she felt its passionate and imaginative quality, and made up selections to send him, but ended always by putting them away again.
She had his picture in her room, and sometimes she sat down to write with his sadly inscrutable face before her. She could see in it (as she studied it here in her home) the lines of varied and restless thought which make up the face of a man who largely comprehends American civilization in the light of experience.
That face represented to her the highest type of manhood, and something more. It was refined and infinitely subtle compared with the simple, almost ox-like faces of the men about her. It was sad, too, as her father's face in repose was sad, but the sadness was different. There was patient, resigned sadness in her father's eyes and lips; in Mason's, bitter, rebellious, perhaps despairing sadness, and something else, too—youth taking hold on the hopelessness of the whole world.
And yet she knew how sweetly those lips could smile, and she had felt the gentleness and purity hid in those eyes. He looked at her as no other man looked, without boldness, without uncertainty, clean, manly and just; and still there were those cynical lines about the lips; not deep, but still perceptible.
She thought less of his fine, erect bearing, and yet she liked to see him walking down the street. He had physical power and dignity, but his face and eyes were etched in minutest detail upon her brain. The life companionship of such a man came to seem more and more impossible for her to attain to. The common little details of her life seemed to lower her. She fell back into inelegant habits and careless speech, and every time she realized it, it put Mason far off and far above her. Her verse lost its brilliancy, its buoyancy, and became dark and bitter at times.
Every night she wondered if she might not hear from him. He had promised to write, and he had hinted at something very important. She knew that she had no definite claim upon him, and yet her last letter had contained one question, not of any importance only as it gave him a chance to reply if he felt like it.
Then the question came: "What of my winter in the city? What has it done for me? Is not life as insoluble as ever—success as far away as ever?"
Could she live here in the country any easier because of her stay there; did it not, in fact, make life harder?