Mysticism -- Fiction; Supernatural -- Fiction; Virginia -- Fiction
That evening, after she had played to them, Frances fell to telling of a
crippled boy, almost a man, living in a poor flat in New York, the
father an overworked head clerk, the mother a strong, gadabout,
well-meaning person, more apt to reproach than to sustain. There was a
sister, a stenographer, who meant to marry, if she could, some employer.
This nineteen-year-old boy had a passion for travel, who could rarely
travel as far as the street. At intervals, when his father had leisure
to accompany him, he went to a movie. If the piece had scenery, country
and ocean and strange cities, moving throngs and great buildings and
places of which he had read, he was happy. He took the _Geographic_, and
got travel books from a library. He knew more of the earth's surface
than did many a "traveled" person. But it was hot in the city, in his
little stuffy room, or it was cold in the city in houses that could
never buy coal in quantity. He had a good deal of pain, and his eyes got
bigger and bigger.
Curtin had claimed the small bedroom at the end of the upper hall. Drew
slept in the dormer-windowed room above. Frances and Robert Dane
possessed the large room opposite Marget's, next to Linden's. Here were
four windows and each narrow bed placed where it might look forth. This
night the Danes talked awhile, then addressed themselves to sleep.
Robert slept, but Frances found that she was wakeful. Yet she had
definitely turned from care and question of the day, from concern for
her own work left in suspension, even from the face and incident of
Sweet Rocket. From her pillow she saw the stars as they rimmed and rose
above the mountains. At first she seemed to be over there, with the
shadow below and the diamond above, but then to herself she left it all.
There seemed naught about her but cool space. She lay without fret at
wakefulness, though she was intensely awake.
She became aware that, waking, she was becoming rested, refreshed, as
though she had profoundly slept. She was awake above the old waking. The
old waking was dreaminess to this state. Vigor poured into her being,
and all the past was passed. That is, it was passed in its heaviness and
friction, its strain and anxiety. All that seemed to drop away, like
dross leaving gold. It was curious, her sense of gold color of all
things in a gold light of their own, not from without. She became
distinctly aware of influences. They were good. She acquiesced, "Yes, I
will travel with you." Will consenting, her strength was added to those
other strengths. In the plane where she now was flashed out
co-operation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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