That evening, as she sat on the step of her
brown frame shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face
and misshapen body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was this light
that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile. It made her eyes quick
to know the message in the depths of color in the evening sky, or even
the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its crimson
cornucopias filled with hot sunshine. She liked clear, vital colors,
this girl,--the crimsons and blues. They answered her, somehow. They
could speak. There were things in the world that like herself were
marred,--did not understand,--were hungry to know: the gray sky, the
mud swamps, the tawny lichens. She cried sometimes, looking at them,
hardly knowing why: she could not help it, with a vague sense of loss.
It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be alive,--or for her.
Other things her eyes were quicker to see than ours: delicate or grand
lines, which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,--in the homeliest
things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers, as
in the eternal sculpture of the mountains. Was it the disease of her
injured brain that made all things alive to her,--that made her watch,
in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the flashing, victorious rivers,
look pitifully into the face of some dingy mushroom trodden in the mud
before it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to
know what they would say to us? Was it the weakness and ignorance that
made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you
or me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and
sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed.
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