There were things in the world that like herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry to know: the gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens.

She cried sometimes, looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could not help it, with a vague sense of loss.

It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be alive,--or for her.

Other things her eyes were quicker to see than ours: delicate or grand lines, which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,--in the homeliest things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers, as in the eternal sculpture of the mountains.

Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,--that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know what they would say to us?
Was it weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than 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.