Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she roused herself, weak and tired.
She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,--knew nothing of Nature's laws, as you do.

Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor vile thing she was, some coarse weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of the mill, went out, free, like an exile dreaming of home.
You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's brain, there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise above the level of her daily life, drunk with the mere beauty of form and colour.

I do not know,--not knowing how sham or real a thing you mean by artistic insight.

But I do know that the clear light I told you of shone for this girl dimly through this beauty of form and colour; alive.

The Life, rather; and ignorant, with no words for her thoughts, she believed in it as the Highest that she knew.