Chapter 24

NEW WORLD, AND THE WOMAN WHO MAY NOT DWELL THEREIN.

Up here in the glen school-house after my pupils have straggled
home, there comes to me at times, and so sudden that it may be
while I am infusing my tea, a hot desire to write great books.
Perhaps an hour afterwards I rise, beaten, from my desk, flinging
all I have written into the fire (yet rescuing some of it on
second thought), and curse myself as an ingle-nook man, for I see
that one can only paint what he himself has felt, and in my
passion I wish to have all the vices, even to being an impious
man, that I may describe them better. For this may I be pardoned.
It comes to nothing in the end, save that my tea is brackish.

Yet though my solitary life in the glen is cheating me of many
experiences, more helpful to a writer than to a Christian, it has
not been so tame but that I can understand why Babbie cried when
she went into Nanny's garden and saw the new world. Let no one who
loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its
rainbow, and Babbie knew that Gavin loved her. Yet she stood in
woe among the stiff berry bushes, as one who stretches forth her
hands to Love and sees him looking for her, and knows she must
shrink from the arms she would lie in, and only call to him in a
voice he cannot hear. This is not a love that is always bitter. It
grows sweet with age. But could that dry the tears of the little
Egyptian, who had only been a woman for a day?

Much was still dark to her. Of one obstacle that must keep her and
Gavin ever apart she knew, and he did not; but had it been removed
she would have given herself to him humbly, not in her own
longing, but because he wanted her. "Behold what I am," she could
have said to him then, and left the rest to him, believing that
her unworthiness would not drag him down, it would lose itself so
readily in his strength. That Thrums could rise against such a man
if he defied it, she did not believe; but she was to learn the
truth presently from a child.

To most of us, I suppose, has come some shock that was to make us
different men from that hour, and yet, how many days elapsed
before something of the man we had been leapt up in us? Babbie
thought she had buried her old impulsiveness, and then remembering
that from the top of the field she might see Gavin returning from
church, she hastened to the hill to look upon him from a distance.
Before she reached the gate where I had met her and him, however,
she stopped, distressed at her selfishness, and asked bitterly,
"Why am I so different from other women; why should what is so
easy to them be so hard to me?"

"Gavin, my beloved!" the Egyptian cried in her agony, and the wind
caught