Marget smiled. "Ask Wordsworth!"
"I see," said Anna Darcy.
"Very well. Do more than that. Touch!"
With a trail of ivy in her hand she looked past the snapdragon and marigold and larkspur, still blooming, so rich and mild had been this autumn. "Then, as the rooms grew clean, I was with my mother in her birthplace, two hundred miles from here. We were there as adults, moving, loving, understanding with a grown mind, but there in her childhood and girlhood as well, loving to contemplate all the past that was us two! Mine as hers, hers as mine. Mind and feeling ran and caught up with her brothers and sisters, her parents and friends. Her parents remembered their parents and those remembered theirs. Home rose after home, garden after garden, loved place after loved place." Her eyes were upon Drew, whose eyes were upon her. "Do you not see that you can, that you will, recover it all? All that you have been, and you have been very much; all that you are, and you are very much!"
Mimy's singing floated to them from the kitchen:
"There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land,
Oh, pat yo' foot, chillun, don't you get weary!
There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land."
"And then," said Marget, "I was in Rome with Richard. The sun shone, the wind was in cypress and pine, the fountains made liquid sound. Father Tiber glided, Saint Peter's stood. We went to the Sistine Chapel, and then it was the Capitol within and without, and then the Appian Way and all the Campagna—all Rome—not to-day alone, but all Rome. And then not Rome, but starlight nights from the decks of ships. And then—"
"This was actuality, while your hands swept and dusted the parlor there?"