The present she finds before her, and she lifts it up and places it upon a table before her and opens it as if it were a book—a book with but two pages. She seems to find symbols and figures and faint suggestions upon these two pages from which she derives a multitude of ideas and fancies and material to make bitter sentences of words.
It seems to interest her, and it interests me to rare degrees.
She dwells upon the present.
She talks of things in the present with inflections of voice that are in sharp contrast to the sentiments she utters. The while the expression of her face is inscrutable. Taken by and large, she is an inscrutable person. I wonder while I listen, does she herself believe these things?—or is she talking to amuse herself? But perforce I feel a vein of truth in each thing that she says. I look hard at her to discover signs of irony or insincerity—but I can but feel a vein of rancorous truth, or a vein of friendly truth, or a vein of ancient truth, or curious.
Then, as she is talking and in the same moment I am wondering, I consider: What matters it whether or not any of it is true, or whether or not she believes it, or whether or not I can understand it—since she is saying it. Is she not an exquisite person telling me these things in her exquisite voice?
She carries all before her in the world.
For she and I make up a small world.
If she be not brilliant in her talking, then that is because that set of sentences would be ruined by brilliancy.
If she be not profound in her discoursing, then that is because her fancy at the time dwells in the light fantastic and would be ruined by profoundness.
If she be not logical, that is because she is exquisite, which is quite beyond logic.