Calliope sat silent, with her way of sighing and looking by; and it was as if she had suggested to me delicate things, as a rainbow will suggest them.
XX
THE HIDINGS OF POWER
I divined the birches, blurred gray and white against the fog-bound cedars. In the haze the airy trunks, because of their imminence, bore the reality of thought, but the sterner green sank in the distance to the faint avail of speech. It was well to be walking on the Plank Road toward seven o'clock of a June morning, in a mist which might yield fellowship in the same ease with which it breathed on distinctions.
Abel had told how, on that winter way of his among the hills, the sky has fallen in the fog and had surrendered to him a fellowship of dreams. But in Friendship Village, as I had often thought, there are dreams for every one; how should it be otherwise to us faring up and down Daphne Street (where Daphne's feet have been)? And yet that morning on the Plank Road where, if the fancy seized her to walk in beauty, our lady of the laurels might be met at any moment, her power seemed to me to be as frail as wings, and I thought that it would not greatly matter if I were to meet her.
As if my thought of Abel Halsey had brought him, the beat of hoofs won toward me from the village; and presently Major Mary overtook me, and there was Abel, driving with his eyes shut. I hailed him, laughed at him, let him pick me up, and we went on through door after door of the fog, with now a lintel of boughs and now a wall of wild roses.
"Abel," I remember saying abruptly, "dreams are not enough."
"No," he replied, as simply as if we had been talking of it, "dreams are just one of the sources of power ... but doing is enough."
I said weakly—perhaps because it was a morning of chill and fog, when a woman may feel her forlornest, look her plainest, know herself for dust: "But then—what about everybody's heart?"