But having talent altered little. Valeria beat her wings against the walls of the old Indian fortress all in vain. But she studied books, she got clay for modelling, and tools, and in secret wrought rude images that mocked her dreams. By-and-by she flung the tools aside, and the plastic clay that she had meant to fashion into forms of beauty hardened uncouthly into an unmeaning mass. An interim of aimlessness and despair of life was followed by a gradual healing of the spirit and restored activity of mind, through nothing more nor less than the power of poetry. Saturated with Keats and Shelley, she took up again her old childish habit of verse-making, but very seriously now, thinking of herself as a poet. Some hint of the way she passed her time, some whisper, through servants or others, of the reams of paper she engrossed with verse, got abroad in the town. She was asked to contribute to the _Mioto Gazette_, and was stopped on her way from church, by people she scarcely knew, to hear that her fellow-townsmen were full of curiosity and pride at having a poet among them. She was embarrassed, but not altogether displeased. Not so Mrs. Gano, whose favorite remark about the good people of New Plymouth was that they didn't know a B from a bull's foot. _Of course_ they were impressed that any one in this benighted place should write verse! "Just tell them the next time they bother you that the Ganos do it by the yard." It was very difficult to impress this mother of hers, who took so much for granted. "I think," said Valeria, with dignity, laying down a volume of _Aurora Leigh_--"I think I shall seriously devote myself to literature." "Ah! then in that case be careful you don't adopt New Plymouth standards." "I am not likely to." "I don't know. Nothing is more difficult than to avoid measuring yourself by the people you live among. John is an ignoramus compared to his father, but he tells me he is considered _here_ a highly educated person." "I think, mother," the girl said, gravely, "that you'll protect me from having too good an opinion of my work." But the conversation had set her thoughts in a new groove. There was truth in this. She must guard against an ignorant satisfaction in her poems. She must have better standards of style; she must know what the masters taught and practised. She must learn to be more critical than even her critical mother. "The great teachers of the world shall be my teachers," she said to herself, and there sprang up within her a new and fiery curiosity about the classics.