The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands, regard the bow of shore-line from the East window—the Other Shore—for a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard lessons resulting from breaking the point of the day's work before sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.
However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this Lake, in teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood—the backward and forward movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere—in short, the Old Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all life—vibration. He arose and started up the bank.
"Don't go yet," the little girl called.
"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."
There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was still cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness of its own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was Summer. The smell of the land was there—the perfume of the Old Mother herself which is the perfume of the tea-rose—the blend of all that springs into being.
"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she smells like a tea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant, but the breath of all—as if old Mother Nature were to pass, and you winded the beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like mignonette—not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but when the wind brings it."
He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality of his product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed is dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for years in the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his faults, and loses more and more the wide freedom of his passages. Here was a wrinkled forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming clearly, or when the tension returned. The Other Shore was faintly glorified in her morning veil.
"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not yours until you express them. And the things you express, as I expressed them, are not yours either. What you want to express is the things you get from all this. The value of that is that no one else can do it."
She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.
The Old Man forgot her in a moment.