you had polished you and hollowed you, hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you under the breasts and brought you to the very quick of your form, subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow.       "When I was a child, I loved my father's riding-         whip that he used so often. I loved to handle it, it seemed like a near part of him. So I did his pens, and the jasper seal on his desk. Something seemed to surge through me when I touched them.       "So it is with you, but here The joy I feel! God knows what I feel, but it is joy! Look, you are clean and fine and singled out! I admire you so, you are beautiful: this clean sweep of your sides, this firmness, this hard mould! I would die rather than have it injured with one scar. I wish I could grip you like the fist of the Lord, and have you—"       So she said, and I wondered, feeling trammelled and hurt. It did not make me free. Now I say to her: "No tool, no instrument, no God! Don't touch me and appreciate me. It is an infamy. You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat. Your hand would not be so flig and easy. Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder,      curled up in the sunshine like a princess; when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity. And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, you are afraid if he rises to his feet, though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a mono-         lith, arrested, static.       "Is there nothing in me to make you hesitate? I tell you there is all these. And why should you overlook them in me?—" 

  

  

 NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH 

                               I AND so I cross into another world shyly and in homage linger for an invitation from this unknown that I would trespass on. I am very glad, and all alone in the world, all alone, and very glad, in a new world where I am disembarked at last. I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world, just ventured in. I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is nobody to know. And whosoever the unknown people of this un-          known world may be they will never 

 Prev. P 32/42 next