her was alive and vivid: even the hateful things had grown interesting
because they were a part of herself.

"I wonder if Liff Hyatt knows who my mother was?" she mused; and it
filled her with a tremor of surprise to think that some woman who was
once young and slight, with quick motions of the blood like hers, had
carried her in her breast, and watched her sleeping. She had always
thought of her mother as so long dead as to be no more than a nameless
pinch of earth; but now it occurred to her that the once-young woman
might be alive, and wrinkled and elf-locked like the woman she had
sometimes seen in the door of the brown house that Lucius Harney wanted
to draw.

The thought brought him back to the central point in her mind, and
she strayed away from the conjectures roused by Liff Hyatt's presence.
Speculations concerning the past could not hold her long when the
present was so rich, the future so rosy, and when Lucius Harney,
a stone's throw away, was bending over his sketch-book, frowning,
calculating, measuring, and then throwing his head back with the sudden
smile that had shed its brightness over everything.

She scrambled to her feet, but as she did so she saw him coming up the
pasture and dropped down on the grass to wait. When he was drawing and
measuring one of "his houses," as she called them, she often strayed
away by herself into the woods or up the hillside. It was partly from
shyness that she did so: from a sense of inadequacy that came to her
most painfully when her companion, absorbed in his job, forgot her
ignorance and her inability to follow his least allusion, and plunged
into a monologue on art and life. To avoid the awkwardness of listening
with a blank face, and also to escape the surprised stare of the