"There is one's religion," she said quietly and not uncordially. But she had retreated intangibly from him. She sat there, remote as her cold pearls, as far from the rough, sweet uses of the world as the priceless china in her cabinets.
"Oh, yes, of course, there is religion," he answered listlessly.
Two days later they sat, all three, in her library, while West read them his poems. The two looked at each other in amazement. Where had this untrained factory boy got it all? What wonderful voices had sung to him above the whirring of the wheels; what delicate visions had risen through the smoky pall of his sordid days? He wrote only of Nature: the brown brook water in spring; the pale, hurrying leaves of November; a bird glimpsed through pink apple-blossoms; the full river encircling a bending elm. In the vivid swiftness of effect, the simple subtlety of treatment, there was a recalling of the Japanese witchery of suggestion; the faint tinge of sadness in every poem left in the mind precisely the sweet regret that the beauty of the world must always leave. At the "Clearing Shower," perhaps the most compelling of all his work, quick drops started to the girl's eyes, so intense was the vision of the moist, green-breathing earth, the torn fleece of the clouds, the broken chirping of frightened birds, the softened, yellow light that reassures and saddens at once. His art was not Wordsworth's nor Shelley's; it was as if Keats had turned from human passion and consecrated the beauty of his verse to the beauty of Nature—but simply, sadly, and through a veil of Heine's tears.
Delafield nodded mutely to his niece, then walked over to the boy.
"There will be plenty of people to tell you later," he said, holding out his hand, "but let me be the first. You are a genius, Mr. West, and your country will be proud of your work some day. There is no American to-day writing such poetry."
West took his hand awkwardly, not rising from his chair. He fingered his manuscript nervously.
"I—I wouldn't want to be laughed at," he demurred. "Other folks mightn't be so kind as you. If anybody laughed—I—it would just about kill me!" he concluded, passionately. They smiled sympathetically at each other.
"But no one would laugh, I assure you, Mr. West," Anne murmured, stooping to pick up a scattered sheet.
He hardly noticed her. His eyes were fixed constantly on Delafield: the girl had made no impression upon him whatever. Nor did the elegance of the furnishings, the evidences of great wealth everywhere arouse in him the least apparent curiosity. Having no knowledge of the many grades of material prosperity between his own meagre surroundings and Anne Delafield's luxury, he accepted the one as he had endured the other, his mind quite removed from either, his eyes looking beyond.