"How do you know that those hieroglyphics might not mean the salvation of the world if she could spell them out herself, or some great and good person took a steady lamp and went down into her heart and—"
"It takes a very wicked man to read a woman; good men are blinded by them and stumble," Nickols assured me as he came over, stood beside me and ran his long, slender, artist's fingers up and down the keys of the piano, which evoked a strange, diabolical sort of harmony from them. "I understand about it all, so please come tell me you'll marry me." This time his arms almost encircled me, but I slipped between them as he laughed at me with his adorable pagan charm.
"No, Nickols, that would be an easy—and—and delightful way out, but I am really frightened down in some queer part of my anatomy that lies between my breast bone and my spinal column. Something is stirring in my heart and I'm afraid of it. I've got to get out in a wilderness and fight with it."
"Take it out on me," offered Nickols, with a laugh that was both wistful and provoking.
"No, I've got a home panic and I must go."
"Then when do I get my answer from what is left of you after the battle?"
"I'll let you know when to come and get it—under the roof of the Poplars," I answered him from the doorway.
And the very next morning I went down into the Harpeth Valley, driven I knew not by what, nor to what. I only knew that I felt full of a living, smothered flame and I was sure that it was best to let it burst forth in my ancestral abiding place.
I was born of a man who has the most evolved brain in the Harpeth Valley, who has been a drunkard for twenty years, and of a very beautiful and haughty woman whose own mother, to the day of her death, shouted at Methodist love feasts. Is it any wonder that when I was tried by fire I burned "as the cracklings of thorns under a pot?"
"How could you set that ridiculous little Methodist meeting house on the very doorstep of my garden, father?" I demanded, as I stood tall and furious before him in the breakfast room on the morning after my return home from my winter in the East with Aunt Clara. "Cousin Nickols has spent many months out of three years on the plans of restoration for that garden, and he is coming down soon to sketch and photograph it to use in some of his commissions. What shall I—what will you—say to him when he finds that the vista he kept open for the line of Paradise Ridge has been cut off by that pile of stones to house the singing of psalms?" And as I raged I had a feeling of being relentlessly pursued—by something I didn't understand.