There was no conceivable need of crossing the field, and equally there was nothing, to her simple fearlessness, in the least eccentric in wilfully creating a situation you might have to use your wits to abandon; and so infectious was her unthinking bravery that, as occasion and she determined, you fought or ran. As it was prophesied, so it was. The incursion was made, the heifer attacked in good form, the trio fled in close formation, and the safe side of the fence was vaultingly attained with no loss of heart but, gloriously, the guerdon of a memory. All manner of robust childish adventures were natural in her company. Fields were made to be invaded, swamps to be forded, and rivers followed until you found they beat your endurance and were going to make their harbor of the sea and you’d have to leave them to that blest consummation and go home to supper. She was Atalanta at a race in the days when a heart, as yet untired, backed her to the limit. In her reminiscent essay On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket, when my gentleman had adroitly abstracted her purse and she almost ran him down, she celebrates, with some just pride, “my legs (retired race-horses, but still great at a spurt).” And her fearlessness, the robust handmaid of reckless action, may have been an unthinking bravado of youth; equally it may have been the result of a rapid fire of prayer and answer between her and her defending saints. She anticipated danger as little as a child. To entertain suspicion was to admit evil company to her inviolate mind. But, from whatever delicately abstruse causes, she wore a brave decorum of courage, a feather in the cap, a sword of high behavior. On lonely roads she would walk unconcerned, her mind coursing over the centuries, her whimsical smile responsive to warnings from the more circumspect and foreboding. She was the child of nature, the child of God; should she quake in a world which was, though uncoveted, her inheritance? Then, as in later life, she sometimes seemed to be walking through “worlds not realized,” “whether in the body or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth.” And this is no matter for wonder. Thin silvern echoes from the past were always chiming on her inward ear, majestic syllables drew on her imaginings, and while she dwelt on “old, unhappy, far-off things” the new wine of her youth and the immediate loveliness of this present life mingled an intoxicating cup. And suddenly the spell of the past would fall from her, and she would be as irresponsibly alive to the bright beauties of the challenging day as a dryad on holiday out of her tree.