apid
activity going on inside my head. My mind was working with a swiftness
and a coolness which I am somewhat ashamed to mention, and my emotions
were calmed, relaxed, let down from the tension of the last few days and
the last few moments. They had found their way out to an attempt at
self-expression and were at rest. I realize that this is not at all
estimable. The old man was just as unhappy as he had been when I had
felt my heart breaking with sympathy for him, but now he seemed very far
away.

I was snatching up one possibility after another, considering it for a
moment, casting it away and pouncing on another. First of all, the story
must be made as remote as possible from resembling the old man or his
trouble, lest he or any one in the world might think he was intended,
and be wounded.

What is the opposite pole from an old man's tragedy? A lover's tragedy,
of course. Yes, it must be separated lovers, young and passionate and
beautiful, because they would fit in with the back-ground of spring, and
swollen shouting starlit brooks, and the yearly resurrection which was
so closely connected with that ache of emotion that they were a part of
it.

Should the separation come from the weakness or faithlessness of one of
the lovers? No, ah no, I wanted it without ugliness, pure beautiful
sorrow, to fit that dark shadow of the pines ... the lovers must be
separated by outside forces.

What outside forces? Lack of money? Family opposition? Both, perhaps. I
knew plenty of cases of both in the life of our valley.

By this time I had come again to our own house and was swallowed in the
usual thousand home-activities. But underneath all that, quite steadily
my mind continued to work on the story as a wasp in a barn keeps on
silently plastering up the cells of his nest in the midst of the noisy
activities of farm-life. I said to one of the children, "Yes, dear,
wasn't it fun!" and to myself, "To be typical of our tradition-ridden
valley-people, the opposition ought to come from the dead hand of the
past." I asked a caller, "One lump or two?" and thought as I poured the
tea, "And if the character of that opposition could be made to indicate
a fierce capacity for passionate feeling in the older generation, that
would make it doubly useful in the story, not only as part of the
machinery of the plot, but as indicating an inheritance of passionate
feeling in the younger generation, with whom the story is concerned." I
dozed