The game interested her and she lingered, idly fingering book after book. Her delay was repaid when a dingy, much-handled volume seemed to spring from the table, bringing with it a strange thrill. Jean had had a copy of this same book. So had Carl. Both of them had with elaborate indirection kept it from her and, with natural curiosity, she had always been eager to know why. And, with equal naturalness, she had made a solemn vow to read it from cover to cover when she could put her hands upon a copy. It was Leaves of Grass . She opened it eagerly. Her eyes fell on the yellowed page. They read:
O Me! O Life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself for ever reproaching myself (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?), Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
The old man, the shop, the passersby, everything was blotted out by the words, powerful, true, so applicable to her own case. “That the powerful play goes on, and I may contribute a verse,” she repeated softly, consciously changing the pronoun. She paid the man for the book, cheerfully giving up the food which the book would cost, and hurried home with it.
When she had put Jean to bed she sat and read over and over again the words. “Foolish and faithless.” “For who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?” She had been foolish, to the dead Jean she had been faithless. To herself, but a wild happiness filled her that in the hour of difficulty, at the time when she had been forced to make the biggest