Ellen had always had objective points, as it were, in her life, and she always would have, no matter how long she lived. She came to places where she stopped mentally, for retrospection and forethought, wherefrom she could seem to obtain a view of that which lay behind, and of the path which was set for her feet in advance. She saw the tracked and the trackless. Once, going with Abby Atkins and Floretta in search of early spring flowers, Ellen had lingered and let them go out of sight, and had sat down on a springing mat of wintergreen leaves under the windy outstretch of a great pine, and had remained there quite deaf to shrill halloos. She had sat there with eyes of inward scrutiny like an Eastern sage's, motionless as on a rock of thought, while her daily life eddied around her. Ellen, sitting there, had said to herself: "This I will always remember. No matter how long I live, where I am, and what happens to me, I will always remember how I was a child, and sat here this morning in spring under the pine-tree, looking backward and forward. I will never forget." When, finally, Abby and Floretta had run back, and spied her there, they had stared half frightened. "You ain't sick, are you, Ellen?" asked Abby, anxiously. "What are you sitting there for?" asked Floretta. Ellen had replied that she was not sick, and had risen and run on, looking for flowers, but the flowers for her bloomed always against a background of the past, and nodded with forward flings of fragrance into the future; for the other children, who were wholly of their own day and generation, they bloomed in the simple light of their own desire of possession. They picked only flowers, but Ellen picked thoughts, and they kept casting bewildered side-glances at her, for the look which had come into her eyes as she sat beneath the pine-tree lingered. It was as if a rose had a second of self-consciousness between the bud and the blossom; a bird between its mother's brooding and the song. She had caught sight of the innermost processes of things, of her wheels of life.