"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it. She's the noblest girl I know."
That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to me at the time and set me to thinking.
"How old is she?"
"Seventeen."
"What is she interested in?"
"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."
"You might ask her to come."
I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the end of a week he remarked:
"She is coming."
It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the lane together.... She took a seat by the door—she takes it still, the same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell back upon the theme of all themes to me—a man's work, the meaning of it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered the ultimate heresy—that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and religion are the same at the top; that the nearer one reaches the top, the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and integrating the life that lasts.