MEN I HAVE PAINTED
And then a lady came tripping in to greet me, smiling so frankly and kindly, that I was at home at once, and in love with the books and flowers, and the gay vista, through the garden to the silver willows, casting shadows on the placid river. And, as I stood by her side talking about the simple and pretty border-flowers, I glanced sidewise at the slight, frail, but somewhat rigid figure, at the delicate Dante-like profile, the dark, full eyes, and wondered at the woman who had jumped into the field of life, and surmounted its obstacles at a run, a gallop, a canter, and a trot, but never at a walk.
Was she thinking of the flowers, the bees, and the butterflies? Or, like mine, were her thoughts straying among the other thoughts that were then crowding around her—impulses in the ether, surging over her from the most distant lands in the far-flung Empire, because she had revealed her soul to the peoples?
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