But that first May day of her discovery, when called out to wander lonely as a cloud by the spirit of spring--the day she had happened on her magic circle,--all that rough upland world was burgeoning, and the beauty of those deserted fields hurt the heart. Susan never easily wept, but that day--safely hidden in the magic circle, then newly hers--she threw herself down on the ghost-gray moss among the spicy tufts of sweet fern and enjoyed, as she later told me, the most sensuously abandoned good cry of her life. The dogwood trees were a glory of flushed white about her, shining in on every hand through the black-green cedars, as if the stars had rushed forward toward earth and clustered more thickly in a nearer midnight sky. Life had no right to be so overwhelmingly fair--if these poignant gusts of beauty gave no sanction to all that the bruised heart of man might long for of peace and joy! If life must be accepted as an idiot's tale, signifying nothing, then it was a refinement of that torture that it could suddenly lift--as a sterile wave lifts only to break--to such dizzying, ecstatic heights.... No, no--it was impossible! It was unthinkable! It was absurd! That year we spent July, August, and early September in France, but late September found us back in New Haven for those autumnal weeks which are the golden, heady wine of our New England cycle. Praise of the New England October, for those who have experienced it, must always seem futile, and for those who have not, exaggerated and false. Summer does not decay in New England; it first smoulders and then flares out in a clear multicolored glory of flame; it does not sicken to corruption, it shouts and sings and is transfigured. I had suggested to Susan, therefore, a flight to higher hills--to the Berkshires, to be precise--where we might more spaciously watch these smoke-less frost-fires flicker up, spread, consume themselves, and at last leap from the crests, to vanish rather than die. But Susan, pleading a desire to settle down after much wandering, begged off. She did not tell me that she had a private sanctuary, too long unvisited, hidden among nearer and humbler hills. The rough fields of the old farm were now rich with crimson and gold--bright yellow gold, red gold, green and tarnished gold--or misted over with the horizon blue of wild asters, a needed softening of tone in a world else so vibrant with light, so nakedly clear. This was another and perhaps even a deeper intoxication than that of the flood tide of spring. Unbearably beautiful it grew at its climax of splendor! An unseen organist unloosed all his stops, and Susan, like a little child overpowered by that rocking clamor, was shaken by it and almost whimpered for mercy....