"Tell me about it."
"I don't know that I can, very well. It's hard to put pictures into words. I fear it will sound very conventional as I tell it, but of course it is what one puts into it that makes for individuality. It is in the woods, too. You know, Karl, how I love the woods. And I know them! It is not spring now, but middle summer; no suggestion of fall, but mature summer. A girl—just about such a girl as I was before you came that day and changed everything—had gone into the woods with a couple of books. She had been sitting under a tree, reading. But in the picture she is standing up very straight, leaning against the tree, the books overturned and forgotten at her feet—drawn into the bigger book—see? It is not that she has consciously yielded herself. It is not that she is consciously doing anything. She is listening—oh how she listens and longs! For what, none of us know—she least of all. Perhaps to the far off call of life and love speaking through the tender spirit of the woods. Oh how I love that girl!—and believe in her—and hope for her. In her eyes are the dreams of centuries. And don't you see that it is the same idea—the oneness—the openness of nature to the soul open to it?"
"And you are going to make the woods very beautiful?" he asked, after a little thought. "More than just the beauty of trees and grass and colour?"
"Yes, the beauty that calls to one.
"Then," he said this a little timidly—"might it not be striking to have your girl, not really seeing it with the eyes at all? Have her eyes—closed, perhaps, but she feeling it, knowing it, in the higher sense really seeing it, just the same?"
She thought about that a minute. "N—o, Karl; I think not. It seems to me she must be open to it in every way to make it stand for life, in the sense I want it to."
"Perhaps," he said, his voice drooping a little. And then, abruptly:
"Have you done any of that?"
"Oh, just some little sketches."
"Show me the little sketches," he begged. "I want to see them all."
"Oh, but Karl, they wouldn't convey the idea at all. Wait until it is farther along."