Then, presto! What a dreary lot they are when the revellers lay aside the motley! Ruth had come from a far South Sea isle.

The world had not passed by but had gone around it in a tremendous half-circle.

Many things were only words, sounds; she could not construct these words and sounds into objects; or, if she did, invariably missed the mark.
Her education was remarkable in that it was overdeveloped here and underdeveloped there: the woman of thirty and the child of ten were always getting in each other's way.

Until she had left her island, what she heard and what she saw were truths.

And now she was discovering that even Nature was something of a liar, with her mirages and her horizons.
At the present moment she was living in a world of her own creation, a carnival of brave men and fair women, characters out of the tales she had so newly read for the first time.