he gaucheries of the Young Person, the better. She did not
gauge the real and tumultuous depths of feeling concealed under the
young girl's simplicity.

The revolutionaries and the insurgent and free poets didn't trouble
Mary Virginia very much. Although she sensed that something was wrong
with somebody somewhere--hence these lyrical lamentations--she could
not, to save her, tell what all the pother was about, for as yet she
saw the world _couleur de rose_. Some one or two of the French and
Germans pleased her; she fell into long reveries over the Gael, who
has the sound of the sea in his voice and whose eyes are full of a
haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who
electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a
young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced
with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half
blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling
passion with which they burned.

And in that crucial moment she chanced upon the "Diary of Marie
Bashkirtseff," so frank and so astounding that it took her breath away
and swept her off her feet. She was stirred into a vague and trembling
expectancy; she had the sense of waiting for something to happen. Life
instantly became more colorful and more wonderful than she had dreamed
could be possible, and she wished passionately to experience all these
emotions, so powerful and so poignant. The Russian's morbid and
disease-bright genius acted upon her as with the force and intensity
of a new and potent toxin. She could not lay the book aside, but
carried it up to her room to be pored and pondered over. She failed to
understand that, untried as she was, it was impossible for her to
understand it. Had the book come later, it had been harmless enough;
but it came at a most critical moment of that seething period when
youth turns inward to question the universe, and demands that the
answer shall be personal to itself. The first long ground-swell of
awakening emotion swept over her, sitting in the pleasant chintz-hung
room, with the Russian woman's wild and tameless heart beating through
the book open upon her knees. And these waves of emotion that at
recurrent intervals surge over the soul, come from the shores of a
farther country than any earthly seas have touched, and recede to
depths so profound that only the eyes of God may follow their ebb and
flow.

Mrs. Baker