to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do;
these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed.
Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer
noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in
the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in
a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she roused
herself, weak and tired.

She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,--knew nothing of
Nature's laws, as you do. Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of
the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning,
or, in the farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven
exultant with the life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor
vile thing she was, some coarse weight fell off, and something
within, not the sickly Lois of the mill, went out, free, like an
exile dreaming of home.

You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's
brain, there were fragments of some artistic insight that made
her thus rise above the level of her daily life, drunk with the
mere beauty of form and colour. I do not know,--not knowing how
sham or real a thing you mean by artistic insight. But I do know
that the clear light I told you of shone for this girl dimly
through this beauty of form and colour; alive. The Life, rather;
and ignorant, with no words for her thoughts, she believed in it
as the Highest that she knew. I think it came to her thus in
imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints and lines, as
to artists,)--a language, the same that Moses heard when he stood
alone, with nothing between his naked soul and God, but the
desert and the mountain and the bush that burned with fire. I