Brain
and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the revelation was
between Nature and herself. Nature was so vast; she was so insignificant;
changes in its motionless inorganic life were imperceptible save through
the telescopes of years; but she, like the wind, the water, and the
clouds, was variable, inconstant. Was there any real relation between the
vast, imperturbable earth, its seas, its forests, its mountains and its
plains, its life of tree and plant and flower and the men and women
dotted on its surface? Did they belong to each other, or were mankind
only, as it were, vermin infesting the desirable world? Did they belong
to each other? It meant so much if they did belong, and she loved to
think they did. Many a time she kissed the smooth bole of a maple or
whispered to it; or laid her cheek against a mossy rock and murmured a
greeting in the spirit of a companionship as old as the making of the
world.
On the evening of this day of her destiny--carrying the story of her own
fate within its twenty-four hours--she was in a mood of detachment from
life's routine. As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself in
visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this
primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be.
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