Above all, must she talk to him of the people in these farms, the frugal, or silent, or brooding people of the hills; honourable, hard, knotted, prejudiced, believing folk, whose lives and fates, whose spiritual visions and madnesses, were entwined with her own young memories and deepest affections.
Figure after figure, story after story, did he draw from her,--warm from the hidden fire of her own strenuous, loving life.

Once or twice she spoke of her mother--like one drawing a veil for an instant from a holy of holies.

He felt and saw the burning of a sacred fire; then the veil dropped, nor would it lift again for any word of his.

And every now and then, a phrase that startled him by its quality,--its suggestions.
Presently he was staring at her with his dark absent eyes.
'Heavens!'-- he was thinking--'what a woman there is in her!--what a nature!' The artist--the poet--the lover of things significant and moving,--all these were stirred in him as he listened to her, as he watched her young and noble beauty.
* * * * * But, in the end, he would not grant her much, argumentatively.
'You make me see strange things--magnificent things, if you like! But your old New England saints and dreamers are not your last word in America.

They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down.