divinest spirit that had ever burned within a woman. He did not
say so. On the contrary, he was frightened, and tried angrily,
passionately, to dissuade. Yet he knew that if she wavered he would
never forgive her; she would drop at once from her high estate into
those depths in his opinion where the dull average of both sexes
sprawled for ever in indiscriminate heaps. Priscilla never dreamed of
wavering. She, most poetic of princesses, made apparently of ivory and
amber, outwardly so cool and serene and gentle, was inwardly on fire.
The fire, I should add, burnt with a very white flame. Nothing in
the shape of a young man had ever had the stoking of it. It was
that whitest of flames that leaps highest at the thought of
abstractions--freedom, beauty of life, simplicity, and the rest. This,
I would remark, is a most rare light to find burning in a woman's
breast. What she was, however, Fritzing had made her. True the
material had been extraordinarily good, and for ten years he had
done as he liked with it. Beginning with the simpler poems of
Wordsworth--he detested them, but they were better than soiling her
soul with Longfellow and Mrs. Hemans--those lessons in English
literature, meant by the authorities to be as innocuous to her as to
her sisters, had opened her eyes in a way nothing else could have done
to the width of the world and the littleness of Kunitz. With that good
teacher, as eager to lead as she to follow, she wandered down the
splendid walks of culture, met there the best people of all ages,
communed with mighty souls, heard how they talked, saw how they lived,
and none, not one, lived and talked as they lived and talked at
Kunitz.

Imagine a girl influenced for ten years, ten of her softest most
wax-like years, by a Fritzing, taught to love freedom, to see the
beauty of plain things, of quietness, of the things appertaining to