At Shaylor's Patch, as the summer days passed by in sunshine and warm flower-scented breezes, where she was comforted, petted, made much of, where an infinite indulgence reigned, she was swallowing something quite different from the medicine that the allies proposed for her treatment. She was drinking a heady new wine. She was seeing with new eyes, travelling through new lands of thought and of feeling. Her spirit rejoiced as in a great emancipation--in being allowed, at last, to move, to live, to find itself, to meet its fellows, to give thanks to a world no longer its taskmaster, but the furnisher of its joys and the abetter in its pleasures. Of what should she be afraid in such a mood, of what ashamed? At Shaylor's Patch it seemed that rebellion might not only be admirable, as it often is, but that it would be easy--which it is very seldom. For the real Great World--that amalgam of all the forces of the three allies, that mighty thing which so envelopes most people from the cradle to the grave that their speculations stray beyond it no more--and often much less--than their actions--this great thing had hardly a representative among all who came and went. These folks belonged to various little worlds, which had got as it were chipped off from the big one, and had acquired little atmospheres and little orbits of their own; from time to time they collided with one another, but nobody minded that--neither planet seemed a pin better or worse for the encounter. Each was inhabited by a few teachers and a body of disciples sometimes not much more numerous; teachers and disciples alike seemed very busy, very happy, and (to be frank) in many cases agreeably self-satisfied. Afraid of the big world--lest they should come into collision with that and be shattered to miserable atoms? Not a bit of it! For, you see, the big world was, for all its imposing and threatening appearance, really moribund, whereas they were young, vigorous, growing. Paralysis had set in in the Giant's legs. He could not catch them. Presently the disease would reach his heart. He would die, and they would parcel out all his possessions. Would they quarrel among themselves, these children of progress? Probably they would, as they cheerfully admitted. What matter? Such quarrels are stimulating, good for brain and heart, illuminating. Nay, in the end, not quarrels at all. The only real deadly quarrel was with the Giant. Would there be no danger of a new Giant coming into being, born of a union of all of them, just as despotic, just as lethargic, as the old? Into this distant speculation they did not enter, and their discreet forbearance may pardonably be imitated here.