ntains until she felt
that she must go out and face them: stand once more outside, free of
walls, and stare about at the whole chain of the earth-lords. Perhaps
the spring, which had broken up the ice-bound streams, had melted other
things besides. Unwittingly--by unconscious cerebration--by the long
inevitable storing of disdained impressions--she had arrived at vision.
That which had been, for her, alternate gibberish and silence, had
become an intelligible tongue. The blank features had stirred and
shifted into a countenance; she saw a face, where she had seen only odds
and ends of modelling grotesquely flung abroad. With no stupid pantheism
to befuddle her, she yet felt the earth a living thing. Wood and stone,
which had not even been an idol for her, now shaped themselves to hold a
sacrament. Put it as you please; for I can find no way to express it to
my satisfaction. Kathleen Somers had, for the first time, envisaged the
cosmic, had seen something less passionate, but more vital, than
history. Most of us are more fortunate than she: we take it for granted
that no loom can rival the petal of a flower. But to some creatures the
primitive is a cipher, hard to learn; and blood is spent in the
struggle. You have perhaps seen (and not simply in the old legend)
passion come to a statue. Rare, oh, rare is the necessity for such a
miracle. But Kathleen Somers was in need of one; and I believe it came
to her.

The will was slack, the nurse had said; yet it sufficed to take her from
her bed, down the stairs, in pursuit of the voice--straight out into the
newly articulate world. She moved, frail and undismayed, to the source
of revelation. She did not cower back and demand that the oracle be
served up to her by a messenger. A will like that is not slack.

Now I will shuffle back into my own skin and tell you the rest of it
very briefly and from the rank outsider's point of view. Even had I
possessed the whole of Arnold Withrow's confidence, I could not deal
with the delicate gradations of a lover's mood. He passed the word about
that Kathleen Somers was not going to die--though I believe he did it
with his heart in his mouth, not really assured she wouldn't. It took
some of us a long time to shift our ground and be thankful. Withrow,
with a wisdom beyond his habit, did not go near her until autumn.
Reports were that she was gaining all the time, and that she lived
out-of-doors staring at Habakkuk and his brethren, gathering