The Day of His Youth

								

world. My father's voice sounds far-off and hollow; even his face is
strange, as if half hidden by a mist. I do not see the others at your
camp, even though they and all their ways ought to be deliciously new
to me, like another language. Only when some one touches your hand, or
gives you a flower, or treats you familiarly! Then a sudden passion of
hatred for the whole world shakes me to the centre, and I long to seize
you in my arms, and speed away with you, along the lake and over the
hills. I am, in my own eyes, what I have always supposed savages to be;
perhaps I am a savage. But there is one agony you might spare me: the
story of your life before you came here. Twenty wasted years, and I did
not know you! Spring after spring and snow upon snow, when, like an
earth-born beast, I was living here in content, rowing, skating,
talking with the birds, and you, not fifty miles away, had risen like a
star and were gleaming there in that inaccessible heaven. That this
should be so, that I must accept it, is terrible to me; but to hear the
story of it is like a foretaste of death. It fascinates, it draws me,
and yet it kills. That you should say "we" over and over again, when
you talk of the music you have heard, the books you have read, is more
than I can bear. But I would not have you cease. I must know all, all;
and yet it tortures.
[Sidenote: Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume]
Frankly, I don't at all like the tone of your letter. I like it as
little as I approve your fashion of treating me "before folks." You
glower upon me; half as if I were daughter of the sun and you his
priest, and half Circassian slave. I don't like it! I came here to
these solitudes for rest and mental peace. My mind is lying fallow.
Should it waken to any immediate fertility, I don't want to expend it
on you, either in antiphonal sentiment or in staving off heroics. To
speak brutally, I want it for the publisher and mine own after-glory.
If this plain statement of the case doesn't blight the peach-blossoms
of your fancy, I don't know what will. Write me about your life here,
the life of the woods and lake. You know enough bird-lore never learned
from books to write a thousand St. Francis sermons. Even the fish have
told you secrets. I fancy they think you some strange, fresh-water
whale not to be accounted for. Tell me about them; and drop this
mawkish sentiment caught from books.
[Sidenote: Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose]
I have read your last letter, but I only half understand you, and I
must wholly disobey. For I have learned the meaning of all things
created, the sky and the earth, the stars that are the habitations of
loving angels, and the worm who seeks his mate. I love you! It is that
for which I have lived my twenty years. At last, without warning, my
life has flowered, and the fragrance of the blossom intoxicates me, its
color blinds. At first I only knew the earth was changed, and that I