those farmhouse parlours much inspiration or enthusiasm for her art.
She kept all that for the old kitchen. At dusk, after she had come in from her rounds, had asked, curtly, for her tea, eaten it, and returned the tray, she would put out her lamp and open her piano—and Mrs. Callender, eagerly on the watch, would simultaneously open all the doors between the old kitchen and the new: surreptitiously, however! For once, when the passage-door had been thrown open a little carelessly and loudly, Miss Kirkcaldie had instantly arisen, had closed it, with meaning, and had played no more that night.
With that single exception, however, the old kitchen, deserted still by day, now awoke each evening, in the mellow flush and flicker of its own firelight (even in the summer these Southern hills grow cold at sundown, and Miss Kirkcaldie was a chilly soul in more senses than one), to a new and magical existence. Its, little humble sphere, heretofore the scene exclusively of practical and actual life, now enclosed experiences neither actual nor practical at all, that were yet exceedingly real. Immortal passions now possessed it, and it sheltered mighty sorrows and consummate joys. Within its homely boundary, vast forces impalpably contended; worlds invisible were born; the secrets of the soul declared themselves, and bodiless longings, formless consolations, pulsed and thrilled. Plaintively, imperatively or with despair, the old kitchen re-echoed now the everlasting questions to which there comes never any answer; and all the while was glorious as a chosen home of the undeniable, divine fact—Beauty!
