"Well, I haven't worked it out exactly--it's just sort of pouring in over me."

"What's pouring over you?" demanded Aunt Nettie.

"Why--the sea of Life," replied Missy desperately.

"For Heaven's sake!" commented Aunt Nettie again.

"It sounds vague; very vague," said father. Was he smiling or frowning?--he had such a queer look in his eyes. But, as he left the table, he paused behind her chair and laid a very gentle hand on her hair.

"Like to go out for a spin in the car?"

But mother declined for her swiftly. "No, Missy must work on her thesis this evening."

So, after supper, Missy took tablet and pencil once more to the summerhouse. It was unusually beautiful out there--just the kind of evening to harmonize with her uplifted mood. Day was ending in still and brilliant serenity. The western sky an immensity of benign light, and draped with clouds of faintly tinted gauze.

"Another day is dying," Missy began to write; then stopped.

The sun sank lower and lower, a reddening ball of sacred fire and, as if to catch from it a spark, Missy sat gazing at it as she chewed her pencil; but no words came to be caught down in pencilled tangibility.

Oh, it hurt!--all this aching sweetness in her, surging through and through, and not able to bring out one word!

"Well?" enquired mother when, finally, she went back to the house.

Missy shook her head. Mother sighed; and Missy felt the sigh echoing in her own heart. Why were words, relatively so much less than inspiration, yet so important for inspiration's expression? And why were they so maddeningly elusive?

For a while, in her little white bed, she lay and stared hopelessly out at the street lamp down at the corner; the glow brought out a beautiful diffusive haze, a misty halo. "Only a signal shewn"...

The winking street lamp seemed to gaze back at her... "Sometimes a signal flashes from out the darkness"... "Only a look"... "But who can comprehend the unfathomable influence of a look?--It may come to a soul wounded and despairing--a soul caught in a wide-sweeping tempest--a soul sad and weary, longing to give up the struggle..."

Where did those words, ringing faintly in her consciousness, come from?

She didn't know, was now too sleepy to ponder deeply. But they had come; that was a promising token. To-morrow more would come; the Valedictory would flow on out of her soul--or into her soul, whichever way it was--in phrases serene, majestic, ineffable.

Missy's eyelids fluttered; the street lamp's halo grew more and more irradiant; gleamed out to illumine, resplendently, a slender girl in white standing on a lighted stage, gazing with luminous eyes out on a darkened auditorium, a house as hushed as when little Eva dies. All the people were listening to the girl up there speaking--the rhythmic lift and fall of her voice, the sentiments fine and n.o.ble and inspiring:

"Ships that pa.s.s in the night and speak each other in pa.s.sing... So, on the ocean of life, we pa.s.s and speak one another... Only a look and a voice... But who can comprehend the unfathomable influence of a look?... which may come to a soul sad and weary, longing to give up the struggle..."

When she awoke next morning raindrops were beating a reiterative plaint against the window, and the sound seemed very beautiful. She liked lying in bed, staring out at the upper reaches of sombre sky. She liked it to be rainy when she woke up--there was something about leaden colour everywhere and falling rain that made you fit for nothing but placid staring, yet, at the same time, pleasantly meditative. Then was the time that the strange big things which filter through your dreams linger evanescently in your mind to ponder over.

"Only a look and a voice--but who can comprehend the--the--the unfathomable influence of a look? It may come to a soul--may come to a soul--"

Bother! How did that go?

Missy shut her eyes and tried to resummon the vision, to rehear those rhythmic words so fraught with wisdom. But all she saw was a sort of heterogeneous ma.s.s of whirling colours, and her thoughts, too, seemed to be just a confused and meaningless jumble. Only her FEELING seemed to remain. She could hardly bear it; why is it that you can feel with that intolerably fecund kind of ache while THOUGHTS refuse to come?

She finally gave it up, and rose and dressed. It was one of those mornings when clothes seem possessed of some demon so that they refuse to go on right. At breakfast she was unwontedly cross, and "talked back"

to Aunt Nettie so that mother made her apologize. At that moment she hated Aunt Nettie, and even almost disliked mother. Then she discovered that Nicky, her little brother, had mischievously hidden her strap of books and, all of a sudden, she did an unheard-of thing: she slapped him! Nicky was so astonished he didn't cry; he didn't even run and tell mother, but Missy, seeing that hurt, bewildered look on his face, felt greater remorse than any punishment could have evoked. She loved Nicky dearly; how could she have done such a thing? But she remembered having read that Poe and Byron and other geniuses often got irritable when in creative mood. Perhaps that was it. The reflection brought a certain consolation.

But, at school, things kept on going wrong. In the Geometry cla.s.s she was a.s.signed the very "proposition" she'd been praying to elude; and, then, she was warned by the teacher--and not too privately--that if she wasn't careful she'd fail to pa.s.s; and that, of course, would mean she couldn't graduate. At the last minute to fail!--after Miss Simpson had started making her dress, and the invitations already sent to the relatives, and all!

And finally, just before she started home, Professor Sutton, the princ.i.p.al, had to call her into his office for a report on her thesis.

The ma.n.u.script had to be handed in for approval, and was already past due. Professor Sutton was very stern with her; he said some kind of an outline, anyway, had to be in by the end of the week. Of course, being a grown-up and a teacher besides, he believed everything should be done on time, and it would be useless to try to explain to him even if one could.

Raymond Bonner was waiting to walk home with her. Raymond often walked home with her and Missy was usually pleased with his devotion; he was the handsomest and most popular boy in the cla.s.s. But, to-day, even Raymond jarred on her. He kept talking, talking, and it was difficult for her preoccupied mind to find the right answer in the right place.

He was talking about the celebrity who was to give the "Lyceum Course"

lecture that evening. The lecturer's name was Dobson. Oh uninspiring name!--Ridgeley Holman Dobson. He was a celebrity because he'd done something-or-other heroic in the Spanish war. Missy didn't know just what it was, not being particularly interested in newspapers and current events, and remote things that didn't matter. But Raymond evidently knew something about Dobson aside from his being just prominent.

"I only hope he kisses old Miss Lightner!" he said, chortling.

"Kisses her?" repeated Missy, roused from her reveries. Why on earth should a lecturer kiss anybody, above all Miss Lightner, who was an old maid and not attractive despite local gossip about her being "man-crazy"? "Why would he kiss Miss Lightner?"

Raymond looked at her in astonishment.

"Why, haven't you heard about him?"

Missy shook her head.

"Why, he's always in the papers! Everywhere he goes, women knock each other down to kiss him! The papers are full of it--don't say you've never heard of it!"

But Missy shook her head again, an expression of distaste on her face.

A man that let women knock each other down to kiss him! Missy had ideals about kissing. She had never been kissed by any one but her immediate relatives and some of her girl friends, but she had her dreams of kisses--kisses such as the poets wrote about. Kissing was something fine, beautiful, sacred! As sacred as getting married. But there was nothing sacred about kissing whole bunches of people who knocked each other down--people you didn't even know. Missy felt a surge of revulsion against this Dobson who could so profane a holy thing.

"I think it's disgusting," she said.

At the unexpected harshness of her tone Raymond glanced at her in some surprise.

"And they call him a hero!" she went on scathingly. "Oh, I guess he's all right," replied Raymond, who was secretly much impressed by the dash of Dobson. "It's just that women make fools of themselves over him."

"You mean he makes a fool of himself! I think he's disgusting. I wouldn't go to hear him speak for worlds!"

Raymond wisely changed the subject. And Missy soon enough forgot the disgusting Dobson in the press of nearer trials. She must get at that outline; she wanted to do it, and yet she shrank from beginning. As often happens when the mind is restless, she had an acute desire to do something with her hands. She wanted to go ahead with Marguerite's hat, but mother, who had a headache and was cross, put her foot down. "Not another minute of dawdling till you write that thesis!" she said, and she might as well have been Gabriel--or whoever it is who trumpets on the day of doom.

So Missy once more took up tablet and pencil. But what's the use commanding your mind, "Now, write!" Your mind can't write, can it?--till it knows what it's going to write about. No matter how much the rest of you wants to write.

At supper-time Missy had no appet.i.te. Mother was too ill to be at the table, but father noticed it.

"Haven't caught mamma's headache, have you?" he asked solicitously.

Missy shook her head; she wished she could tell father it was her soul that ached. Perhaps father sensed something of this for, after glancing at her two or three times, he said:

"Tell you what!--Suppose you go to the lecture with me to-night. Mamma says she won't feel able. What do you say?"

Missy didn't care a whit to hear the disgusting Dobson, but she felt the reason for her reluctance mightn't be understood--might even arouse hateful merriment, for Aunt Nettie was sitting there listening. So she said evasively:

"I think mother wants me to work on my thesis."

"Oh, I can fix it with mother all right," said father.

Missy started to demur further but, so listless was her spirit, she decided it would be easier to go than to try getting out of it. She wouldn't have to pay attention to the detestable Dobson; and she always loved to go places with father.