The personal revelations in Patrins are unmistakable to those who knew her. She writes On the Delights of an Incognito. Who can fail to see L. I. G. herself in the person of the hypothetical R., walking home after “the day at a library desk” where he “had grown hazy with no food and much reading?” And passing the house where he was always delightedly welcome and where he loved to be, he looked in at the shining dinner table where sat the family, unconscious of him and yet—he knew it—only to be the merrier if he dropped in, and “hurried on, never quite so paradoxically happy in his life as when he quitted that familiar pane without rapping, and went back to the dark and the frost, unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit among men.” For Louise Guiney, prettily as she conformed herself to accepted rules, was by nature a vagrom under conventional roofs, a wandering breeze, an addict of fern seed, a cloud, a rainbow fancy, whatever could make itself, as speedily as might be, impalpable to the eye and only a memory to the too-inquisitive mind. As to the inner philosophy of her, the cup of strength she kept ever by her in intimate stillnesses, there it stands in another essay, The Precept of Peace. This bears much dwelling on, not only by the mystic but the honest mind distraught in the terrifying assaults of modern life. How to serve the world while renouncing it, how to possess your own soul, in the peace that lets it grow and ripen seed! She is in love, not with indifference, but the brave behavior it endows you with. “A very little non-adhesion to common affairs,” she tells you, “a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate.”