For a long time she stood quietly looking in. Zora was curled in a chair
with a book. She was in dreamland; in a world of books builded
thoughtfully for her by Mrs. Vanderpool, and before that by Miss Smith.
Her work took but little of her time and left hours for reading and
thinking. In that thought-life, more and more her real living centred.
Hour after hour, day after day, she lay buried, deaf and dumb to all
else. Her heart cried, up on the World's four corners of the Way, and to
it came the Vision Splendid. She gossiped with old Herodotus across the
earth to the black and blameless Ethiopians; she saw the sculptured
glories of Phidias marbled amid the splendor of the swamp; she listened
to Demosthenes and walked the Appian Way with Cornelia--while all New
York streamed beneath her window.
She saw the drunken Goths reel upon Rome and heard the careless Negroes
yodle as they galloped to Toomsville. Paris, she knew,--wonderful,
haunting Paris: the Paris of Clovis, and St. Louis; of Louis the Great,
and Napoleon III; of Balzac, and her own Dumas. She tasted the mud and
comfort of thick old London, and the while wept with Jeremiah and sang
with Deborah, Semiramis, and Atala. Mary of Scotland and Joan of Arc
held her dark hands in theirs, and Kings lifted up their sceptres.
She walked on worlds, and worlds of worlds, and heard there in her
little room the tread of armies, the paeans of victory, the breaking of
hearts, and the music of the spheres.
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