She liked clear,
vital colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues. They answered
her, somehow. They could speak. There were things in the world
that like herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry
to know: the gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens. She
cried sometimes, looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could
not help it, with a vague sense of loss. It seemed at those
times so dreary for them to be alive,--or for her. Other things
her eyes were quicker to see than ours: delicate or grand lines,
which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,--in the homeliest
things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers,
as in the eternal sculpture of the mountains. Was it the disease
of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,--that
made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the
flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some
starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it
scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know
what they would say to us? Was it weakness and ignorance that
made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than
to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do;
these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed.
Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer
noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in
the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in
a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she roused
herself, weak and tired.
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