"I had only seventy-five cents in the world but Paradise isn't bought with money.
"Then I sat down on an old boulder and tried to put those moments of delicate happiness into a poem. I caught the shape of them fairly well, I think... but not their soul. It escaped me.
"It was quite dark when I came back and the whole character of my Land of Uprightness seemed changed. It was eerie... almost sinister. I would have run if I could have dared. The trees, my old well- known friends, were strange and aloof. The sounds I heard were not the cheery, companionable sounds of daytime... nor the friendly, fairy sounds of the sunset... they were creeping and weird, as if the life of the woods had suddenly developed something almost hostile to me... something at least that was furtive and alien and unacquainted. I could fancy that I heard stealthy footsteps all around me... that strange eyes were watching me through the boughs. When I reached the open space and hopped over the fence into Aunt Ruth's back yard I felt as if I were escaping from some fascinating but not altogether hallowed locality... a place given over to Paganism and the revels of satyrs. I don't believe the woods are ever wholly Christian in the darkness. There is always a lurking life in them that dares not show itself to the sun but regains its own with the night.
"'You should not be out in the damp with that cough of yours,' said Aunt Ruth.
"But it wasn't the damp that hurt me... for I WAS hurt. It was that little fascinating whisper of something unholy. I was afraid of it... and yet I loved it. The beauty I had loved on the hill-top seemed suddenly quite tasteless beside it. I sat down in my room and wrote another poem. When I had written it I felt that I had exorcised something out of my soul and Emily-in-the-Glass seemed no longer a stranger to me.
"Aunt Ruth has just brought in a dose of hot milk and cayenne pepper for my cough. It is on the table before me... I have to drink it... and it has made both Paradise and Pagan-land seem very foolish and unreal!
"May 25, 19...
"Dean came home from New York last Friday and that evening we walked and talked in New Moon garden in a weird, uncanny twilight following a rainy day. I had a light dress on and as Dean came down the path he said,
"'When I saw you first I thought you were a wild, white cherry- tree... like THAT'... and he pointed to one that was leaning and beckoning, ghost-fair in the dusk, from Lofty John's bush.
"It was such a beautiful thing that just to be distantly compared to it made me feel very well pleased with myself, and it was lovely to have dear old Dean back again. So we had a delightful evening, and picked a big bunch of Cousin Jimmy's pansies and watched the grey rain-clouds draw together in great purple masses in the east, leaving the western sky all clear and star-powdered.
"'There is something in your company,' said Dean, 'that makes stars seem starrier and pansies purpler.'
"Wasn't that nice of him! How is it that his opinion of me and Aunt Ruth's opinion of me are so very different?
"He had a little flat parcel under his arm and when he went away he handed it to me.
"'I brought you that to counteract Lord Byron,' he said.
"It was a framed copy of the 'Portrait of Giovanna Degli Albizzi, wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni Ghirlanjo'... a Lady of the Quatro Cento. I brought it to Shrewsbury and have it hanging in my room. I love to look at the Lady Giovanna... that slim, beautiful young thing with her sleek coils of pale gold and her prim little curls and her fine, high-bred profile (DID the painter flatter her?) and her white neck and open, unshadowed brow, with the indefinable air over it all of saintliness and remoteness and fate... for the Lady Giovanna died young.
"AND her embroidered velvet sleeves, slashed and puffed, very beautifully made and fitting the arm perfectly. The Lady Giovanna must have had a good dressmaker and, in spite of her saintliness, one thinks she was quite aware of the fact. I am always wishing that she would turn her head and let me see her full face.
"Aunt Ruth thinks she is queer-looking and evidently doubts the propriety of having her in the same room with the jewelled chromo of Queen Alexandra.
"I doubt it myself.
"June 10, 19...
"I do all my studying now by the pool in the Land of Uprightness, among those wonderful, tall, slender trees. I'm a Druidess in the woods... I regard trees with something more than love... worship.
"And then, too, trees, unlike so many humans, always improve on acquaintance. No matter how much you like them at the start you are sure to like them much better further on, and best of all when you have known them for years and enjoyed intercourse with them in all seasons. I know a hundred dear things about these trees in the Land of Uprightness that I didn't know when I came here two years ago.
"Trees have as much individuality as human beings. Not even two spruces are alike. There is always some kink or curve or bend of bough to single each one out from its fellows. Some trees love to grow sociably together, their branches twining, like Ilse and me with our arms about each other, whispering interminably of their secrets. Then there are more exclusive groups of four or five... clan-Murray trees; and there are hermits of trees who choose to stand apart in solitary state and who hold commune only with the winds of heaven. Yet these trees are often the best worth knowing. One feels it is more of a triumph to win their confidence than that of easier trees. To-night I suddenly saw a great, pulsating star resting on the very crest of the big fir that stands alone in the eastern corner and I had a sense of two majesties meeting that will abide with me for days and enchant everything... even classroom routine and dish-washing and Aunt Ruth's Saturday cleaning.
"June 25, 19...
"We had our history examination to-day... the Tudor period. I've found it very fascinating... but more because of what isn't in the histories than of what IS. They don't... they CAN'T tell you what you would really like to know. What did Jane Seymour think of when she was awake in the dark? Of murdered Anne, or of pale, forsaken Katherine? Or just about the fashion of her new ruff? Did she ever think she had paid too high for her crown or was she satisfied with her bargain? And was she happy in those few hours after her little son was born... or did she see a ghostly procession beckoning her onward with them? Was Lady Jane Gray 'Janie' to her friends and did she EVER have a fit of temper? What did Shakespeare's wife actually think of him? And was any man ever REALLY in love with Queen Elizabeth? I am always asking questions like this when I study that pageant of kings and queens and geniuses and puppets put down in the school curriculum as 'The Tudor Period.'
"July 7, 19...
"Two years of High School are over. The result of my exams was such as to please even Aunt Ruth, who condescended to say that she always knew I could study if I put my mind to it. In brief, I led my class. And I'm pleased. But I begin to understand what Dean meant when he said real education was what you dug out of life for yourself. After all, the things that have taught me the most these past two years have been my wanderings in the Land of Uprightness, and my night on the haystack, and the Lady Giovanna, and the old woman who spanked the King, and trying to write nothing but FACTS, and things like that. Even rejection slips and hating Evelyn Blake have taught me something. Speaking of Evelyn... she failed in her exams and will have to take her senior year over again. I am truly sorry.