“But it’s really funny! Especially if you had seen me when I was a girl—shy, awkward, prudish—yes, prudish, Felix. When I was eighteen, I was the worst little old maid you ever saw. I read romantic books all the time, and real people seemed to me coarse and horrible. I hated everybody. I wouldn’t go to boy-and-girl parties, because of the—it still seems an ugly word to me—‘spooning’ that went on in the corners. I wouldn’t dance, I wouldn’t hold hands. I wouldn’t keep company. Oh, I was terrible. For a while I wanted to be a missionary in some savage country—” “And teach the natives to wear clothes?—is that your secret ambition?” he laughed. “No—for I got converted ... to paganism. When I was twenty-one years old. It was a book that converted me.” “I really know very little about you, don’t I? All this seems so strange.... I’ve imagined you as always being what you are now. What book was it converted you?” “It was ‘Leaves of Grass.’ You remember I told you how I decided to be a librarian, and took a course of training, and was made an assistant in the library at Springfield.... Well, there was a shelf of forbidden books—and one day I opened one of those forbidden books, and read a passage.... I’ll tell you: it was ‘A woman’s body at auction’—do you remember it? Uncouth, wonderful lines—not so much poetry to me as a revelation. I remember I stood there reading some of those lines again and again, and I went back to the desk saying them over and over to myself—just rough, plain phrases naming over one by one the joints and muscles and parts of the body, like an anatomy text-book—but making me feel, as no text-book had ever done, that these wonderful things were _my_ body! Those lines still have a thrill for me—” And she chanted, solemnly, like a litany: “_Upper arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Ribs, belly, back-bone, hips, hip-sockets.... O I say these are not parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul!_” She paused, and smoked her cigarette silently, remembering. “I went around the rest of that day,” she said presently, “in a dreaming ecstasy.... I had read in some of my father’s books about the mystics, and I knew that I felt like them when they had seen God.... I looked every now and then with a kind of awe at my wrist or my finger-nail, saying to myself, _These are not parts of the body only, but of the soul!_ And that night I took the book home, and read it in bed, happy and afraid....