Rachel said nothing.  She seldom commented on the confidences that were made to her.  She saw that Hester, always delicate, was making an enormous effort under conditions which would be certain to entail disastrous effects on her health.  The book was sapping her strength like a vampire, and the Gresleys were evidently exhausting it still further by unconsciously strewing her path with difficulties.  Rachel did not know them, but she supposed they belonged to that large class whose eyes are holden.

“And the book itself?  Is it nearly finished?”

Hester’s face changed.  Eagerly, shyly, enthusiastically she talked to her friend about the book, as a young girl talks of her lover.  Everything else was forgotten.  Hester’s eyes burned.  Her color came and went.  She was transfigured.

The protecting, anxious affection died out of Rachel’s face as she looked at Hester, and gave place to a certain wistful, half-envious admiration.  She had once been shaken by all these emotions herself, years ago, when she was in love.  She had regarded them as a revelation while they lasted; and afterwards, as a steep step—­a very steep step—­upon the stair of life.  But she realized now that such as Hester live constantly in the world which the greater number of us can only enter when human passion lends us the key; the world at which, when the gates are shut against us, the coarser minded among us are not ashamed to level their ridicule and contempt.

Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself.  She saw it complete, beautiful—­an entrancing vision, inaccessible, as a sunset.

“I cannot reach up to it.  I cannot get near it,” she said.  “When I try to write it, it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of charcoal.  I understate everything.  Yet I labor day by day travestying it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind.  I make everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words.  I go alone into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees.  And gradually I understand and know.  And I listen, and Nature speaks, really speaks—­not a facon de parler, as some people think who explain to you that you mean this or that by your words which you don’t mean—­and her spirit becomes one with my spirit.  And I feel I can never again misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander so far away from her that every white anemone and every seedling fern disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among them.  And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the night, to find words to translate it into.  But there are no words, or, if there are, I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down.  And, oh!  Rachel, the worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have been, when the vision fades, I know I shall admire what I have written.  It is that that breaks my heart.”