“The lady of the picture and letter is one of them, you said. But of course they are not all grown up like her.” “Yes, they are, for I like grown-up people best. I don’t like those of my own age. At least I have seen but few whom I liked. The reason I am so fond of my own people, is because I make them myself, and so, of course, I make them to suit me. They are charming, and very fond of me. You would call them unreal; but to me they are more real than the flesh and blood people hereabouts, and much more agreeable.” “Ah! I understand now,” said the stranger. “They are your own people in the sense of being congenial, companionable, of your own way of thinking. You have gone direct to a great truth, little friend. Our own people are those with whom we are in intellectual sympathy, no matter where we find them.” “But your other people,” he went on, after a short pause, motioning with his hand toward the house, “your family,--you love them, too?” “No; we don’t love each other,” she answered, frankly; “we seem not to fit well together--not to be thinking the same thoughts. The most of me is completely shut away from them. I cannot talk to them as I am talking to you. They would laugh at me; they would ridicule me, and that enrages as well as hurts me. And they are going away one by one, interested in their own lives and knowing nothing of my dreams and longings. Two of my sisters married recently and have gone far away, and last week my oldest brother left. I watched him out of sight as he went down the road, with my heart almost bursting. So it was when the others went. Everything was desolate without them, and they will never be back here again in the old way. Not that the old way was so good, for it wasn’t, but I could not bear to see the end. I suffer if only an animal dies or is taken away. And I always wanted to love them; but they did not understand.” The stranger’s eyes grew pitiful, not so much for what she had suffered as for what she was destined to suffer. He saw her as she was, and as no other had seen her, none having the power to understand,--a sensitive, affectionate, aspiring soul, held for a time in a place alien to her spirit, among people most truly not her own. “Another,” he said, mentally, “destined to travel the rough road that leads to the heights. Another with a dash of the weightiest gift of the gods. I did not think to find one of the climbers of Olympus here. Yet where none dreams to find them there they are. Poor little soul touched with the wand of genius, already living in a world of her own creation, because the other world is ungenial and intolerable, and longing for sympathy, which is recognition, appreciation, and encourages expression, which is life itself. The old, old spirit in the new body, not comprehended, often wounded, yet striving, striving, always striving against hard conditions to tell what it feels.