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‚ÅÝ‚Äîwhile 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‚ÅÝ‚Äîwonderful, haunting Paris: the Paris of Clovis, and St. ¬ÝLouis; 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.
Mrs. ¬ÝVanderpool watched her a while.
“Zora,” she presently broke into the girl’s absorption, “how would you like to be Ambassador to France?”