s interview. I
had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she
were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body,
as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal
about the wreck.

"What difference could it make?" she asked in her slightly husky voice,
with faint surprise. "It is only the old love-story of a village girl
you will hear. My mother was different from these people, but I had
never known anything beside this life, except books. Of course you can
understand how much else than love the man brought me. I was quite
beautiful then. Does it not seem strange that it could have been true! I
burst into real blossom for him--like Aaron's rod, was it not? And now
you see, I am only the bare rod."

She dropped her lids and looked down at herself calmly. The warmth had
curled the short hairs into a light halo around her forehead, the little
neck was bent, she had folded her hands in her lap. The piteous
child-like chest and limbs revealed by the tight white gown, brought
tears to my eyes. There was something solemn, terrible, in this virginal
decay.

"All that I was to be, was forced into growth at once. He made me a new
self; he was in a sense creator, teacher, parent, friend, idol, lover.
He was the world I have not known; he taught me that I could myself
write, create. I was nearer madness in those days than now, for when he
threw himself here--" She rose and pointed to the floor near the
table--"here on these boards at my feet, and begged me to listen to his
love, to be his wife--I, his wife!--it was as strange, as unreal as a
vision.--I had a month." She did not raise her sweet, level voice, but
the eyes that she fixed on mine were dilated to blackness, and her face
was illumined with an inexpressible light of triumph. "I had one great
month of life. Even you cannot have had more in all your years of the
world than I in my month! And then he returned to his work again. He
was very busy, you understand, a great man, even then, in the world of
letters. He could not come to see me, could not leave; but he wrote
every day. He will never put into his book such words as he wrote me; he
gave me more than he has ever given the world. It may have his books. I
have read them, but I have his very soul in these letters!

"I told you he made me believe that I could write. 'What was I, what was
I,' I used to ask myself, 'to be lifted from this to his height?' And