Hagar answered with a warm colour and a tremulous light from brow to chin. "Yes, if you'll be so good—Elizabeth!"
She crossed the floor with the other to the long, low, bookcase. Elizabeth drew out a couple of volumes. "These are good to begin with—and this." She stood a moment in thought, her back to the case, her elbow resting on its polished top and her head upon her hand. On a shelf behind her stood a small bronze Psyche, a photograph of Botticelli's Judith, a drawing of Florence Nightingale. "Hagar," said Elizabeth, "if I give you two or three books upon the position of woman in the past and to-day, will you read them?"
"I will read anything you give me, Elizabeth."
She took her parcel of books and went back to the Maines'. She read with great rapidity. Her memory was not a verbal one, but her very tissues seemed to absorb the sense of what she read. Much in these books simply formulated for her with clearness what was already in solution in her mind. Here and there she was conscious of lines of difference, of inward criticism, but in the main they but enlarged a content already there, but brought above the threshold, named and fed what she was already thinking. Her mind went back to Eglantine and Roger Michael's talk. "No. It did not begin even here. It was in me. It had been in me a long time, only I didn't know it, or called it other names."
Before these books were finished she got her fifty dollars from the magazine, and the magazine itself was sent her with her story in it. She sat and read the story, and it seemed strange and new in its robe of print. The magazine had provided an illustration—and how strange it was to see her figures (or rather not her figures) moving and laughing there! Again and again, after the first time, she opened the magazine and in part or whole read the story and gazed upon the illustration—half a dozen or more times during the first twenty-four hours, then with dwindling frequency day after day, for a week or so. After that her appetite for her own completed work flagged. She laid the magazine away, and it was years before she read that story again. The fifty dollars—She put thirty-five away to go toward her summer clothes and wrote to her grandmother that she had done so. The remaining fifteen she expended on books, taking starred titles from Elizabeth's list. In January she wrote "The Lame Duck." She sent it to one of the great monthlies. It was accepted, she was paid a fair price, and the monthly gave her to understand that it should like to see Hagar Ashendyne's next story.
The letter came as she was leaving the house for a walk in the Park. There was no great distance to go before you came to an entrance, and she often went alone and wandered here and there by herself. The country was in her veins; not to see trees and grass very often was very bad. She opened the letter, saw what it was, then walked on in a rosy mist. After a while, out under the branched grey trees, she found a bench, sat down, and read it again and yet again. Her soul passioned to do this thing; to write, to write well, to give out wonderfully, beautifully. A letter that told her it was so, that she was doing that which, with the strongest longing, she longed to do, must be to her golden as a love letter. With it open on her lap, with her eyes on the serene, pearl-grey meadow on the edge of which she sat, she stayed a long time, dreaming. A young man and woman, lovers evidently, slowly passed her bench beneath the trees. She watched them with tranquil eyes. "They're lovers," and she felt a reflex of their bliss. They passed, and she watched as happily the grey spaces where a few sheep stirred, and the edge of trees beyond, dream trees in the mist.
Quite simply she fell to thinking of "the boy." He had been often in her mind since the evening of that meeting; she wondered about him a good deal. She did not know his name; she had no idea where he lived; he might be in New York now, or he might not be; she might pass him in the street and not know—though, indeed, now she kept a lookout. He did not know her name; she was to him "the little girl" as he was to her "the boy." They might never meet again, but she had a faith that it would not be so. What she felt toward him was but friendliness, concern, and some admiration; but the feeling had a soft glow and pulse. The most marked thing was the consciousness that she knew him truly; reasoning did not come into it; she could have told herself a dozen times how little she did know, and it would have made no difference. It was as though the boy and she had seen each other's essential self through a clear pane of glass.
Her mind did not dwell long upon him to-day. She sat with her hands crossed above the letter, and her eyes, half-veiled, upon the far horizon. To write—to write—to produce, to lead forth, to give birth, to push out and farther on forever, to make a beautiful thing, and always a more beautiful thing—always—always.... She was more mind than body as she sat there; she saw her thought-children going up to heaven before her.
There came an impulse to look on beauty that other minds had sent forth. She rose and walked, with her light, rhythmic swiftness, northward toward the Metropolitan. When she passed the turnstile there lacked less than an hour of closing time. She went at once toward the rooms where were the casts. There was hardly a moving figure besides herself; there were only the still, white giants. She entered an alcove where there was a seat drawn before a cast of the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici. She sat down and gazed upon Michael Angelo's Thinker. After a while her eyes moved to the great figures of Twilight and Dawn, and then, rising, she crossed to Guliano's Tomb and stood before Day and Night. Presently she left the alcove, and crossing by the models of the Parthenon and of Notre Dame came into the Hall of the Antique and into the presence of the great Venus. Here she stayed until a man came through the place and said it was closing time.
In February she sent to the same monthly "The Mortal." It passed from hand to hand until in due time it reached the editor. He read it, then strolled into the assistant editor's room:—"New star in the sky." But before Hagar could hear from the monthly, another moment in her life was here.