We have
only to close our lids upon our external surroundings and swift as
thought itself is our passage into that fairy land of our reverie.
As early as my tenth year I had begun to build castles in the open
fire and to people the gloaming with whispering shadows; somehow the
habit has grown with me through all these years, with this difference,
however: in the reveries of my womanhood the heroes and heroines come
to me, from a long vanished past, clothed in a misty reality, and
associated with every joy and sorrow of my life.
In my childhood these were typical visions, the anticipation of a
restless impatience which yearned for the touchstone of sober
experience, to-day they are the re-creation of memory, and a rehearsal
of all those circumstances that have made sober experience a
comprehensive word for me.
Not that my life has made a heroine of me either in the world's eyes
or my own. I dare say, to the passive observer, it is plain and
ordinary enough. It is when we take away the flesh and blood reality,
which is the temple of the moral man, that the common-place aspects of
life become strange and attractive.
Subtract one of those every-day lives from the busy, moving mass of
humankind and place it under the microscope; bring up to the visible
surface all that has lain hidden for years from the casual glance of
the general observer; lay bare the secret tenor of its every thought
and motive and impulse. Is it any longer the thing it seemed to be
when jostled about in the busy throng?
Pluck one of the dusty blades of grass that grow unheeded by the
roadside; there are hundreds of them at your feet so much alike that
the one you chose had no identity, whatever, until you had, by chance
or design, separated it from the rest.
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