The first agile months left him a vision of her. He believed it was
herself. He remained motionless and the warm days glided over him. But
this they left. And since the vision, too, was soft and warm and
murmurous and madding, it seemed indeed a part of themselves that the
first agile months had left.
He could see her now; and fix his yearnings upon her; and recognize in
the void a place where she was not. He could hear her. He could feel
her. It mattered little that, as ever, he could not understand her.
A slender, vibrant form she was, standing alone upon his consciousness,
as the strip of ocean stands upon the beach. Beyond the horizon, it
wanders infinitely. This was his sense of her. She had eyes that felt
rather than saw; and fingers that played rather than touched; and the
sharp, firm lines of her body bounded him, rather than herself.
There was nothing after all, to this time, save the vision. Nature was
not. Family was not. And then came the note.
It was like the dawn--a haze of disparted color heralding the sun,
formless, beingless save in this, that it was drenched in the sun’s
coming. And then, from beneath the clouds of blue and green and orange,
a spur of fire. This is without color. But it has all that the dawn
lacked, for it has form and being. It is not the dawn; it is the sun.
And before its flash of flame, the deep mists of radiance fade
away--orange to red and red to green and blue to the low sky. Meantime,
the sun has mounted.
In this way came the note. It read:
_Dear kind boy_:
I am in New York at the Hotel, you see. In a week, I must join
Lawrence in Maine. But I got weary of the little house and closed
it behind me. I don’t know what I hoped to find in the burning
city. But will you ride one hour to spend another hour with me?