mind under the age of forty, but if so it is the result of premature gray matter. I was still in the adolescent period mentally and found great refreshment in the group of young-rooster intellectuals who frequently came to the house. We worked out our theories and opinions on one another as growing children wrestle.

Oxford was a narrow-minded little community, but it was pigeon-breasted morally. The only disciple of Zola in the town was an innocent young man from Arkansas, who had been well grounded in his morals. He was by way of becoming a novelist at that time, but turned out to be a historian. He graduated in vain from the English departments of five universities and was finally reduced to recording facts and dates and rewriting information that he could not digest. It was a form of mental regurgitation. A great many people have it. The one rash thing he ever did was to espouse the cause of realism in fiction, which none of us knew or cared enough to attack. He came in frequently to discuss the subject with me, chiefly, I suppose, because no one else would listen to him.

I have always been interested in bores. They are in my opinion the strangest of human phenomena, probably the one type of character impossible to dramatize. Has any one ever read a novel entitled ‘The Bore’? You have not, because the creative mind cannot produce him. He is automatic mentally. He can learn, frequently more than an intelligent man, but he cannot think. He is without imagination and the personal messengers of sensibility. He never knows or suspects how the other fellow feels. Poor D---- could talk indefinitely in a sensible monotone without the glint of a thought to brighten his durable conversation. To me it has ever been fascinating to watch a good brain work that was totally disconnected from life, charm, or personality.

Everything was settled except the relative merits of the new school of realism in fiction as compared to the old school of romanticism. This was a burning question then. As I remember, Émile Zola was the father of the realists. He had written a particularly disgusting novel, the title of which I do not recall; but one scene in it I am compelled against my will to remember--which, I suppose, proves that Zola was indeed a realist, because I have forgotten ten thousand lines of poetry that entranced me more.

This was a description of the decomposed body of a soldier plowed up on a battlefield after the Franco-Prussian War. Zola omitted not one worm from this picture. Yorick’s skull was a clean white bone as compared with this horrible pollution of what had been a man. He made realism stink for five pages. I shall never be willing to confound this monstrous insensate vitalizing of the processes of death with the convincing romanticism of life, which is what the best literature is. However, my opinion is prejudiced in this matter, for I am an incurable romanticist, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last breath I draw. I think the world of life is one bright illusion conferred upon us by a good God, and that if it becomes anything else, that also is an illusion by which we damn ourselves.

I have a vague recollection of Cæsar or some such person having said that the Romans were made indolent and effeminate by the importation of luxuries from the provinces--a free translation, but the gist of what he meant. I cannot tell what might have happened to me if we had gone on living in Oxford and if Lundy had continued to hold the chair of Greek in Emory College. We were as poor as possible, but I had my little luxuries from the various provinces of literature. Every college community titters with quotations from the best writers and speakers. I was subject during this period to short-flighted aspirations, such, for example, as trying to understand prosody. But I could make nothing of this science of poetry, not even with Lundy’s illuminating assistance. I remember at another time reading Guizot’s ‘History of France.’ This was a real experience and came near starting me to thinking. There is something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.

I cannot tell how I missed my cue, but my suspicion now is that I must have made a more or less deliberate effort to develop mentally. I do recall regretfully certain intellectual flutterings which are never to be confounded with the stirrings of the creative mind.

When it is all over, or nearly over, and we look back with the wisdom of all our experiences gained, we know that love is the best thing in life and that it leads through whatever shadows to the best things we are capable of. So I know now that my devotion to little Faith was more stimulating and informing than anything else.

In contrast to this tender happiness I enjoyed as a mother, I was never free from a nameless fear and anxiety for my husband. It turned out that his duties as the head of the Greek department in the college did not divert his mind from that absorbing passion for peace in God. Rather the fatalism of the Greek mind reacted disastrously upon his own mind. In addition to this his vitality was depleted by overwork. No matter how pale saints are--and I have observed that as a rule they have poor complexions--I shall always contend that it is easier to step up and trust the Lord if you are in good health. Lundy’s strength began to fail and he passed more frequently into those dark periods of despair. So I labored with him in good faith according to his interpretation of the Scriptures. I remember now the premonitions I had of unimaginable misfortunes.

Years passed and our fate had come upon us, driving us far from our little world at Oxford before I finally realized that this was not a spiritual condition from which Lundy suffered, but a very real and dangerous disorder of the mind; melancholia, which took one form after another of religious mania.

I have written out in another place the life we lived during this period, but not the terror and silence that fell upon me. This cannot be set down in words; the frantic efforts I made to save him from himself, and to protect him from that terrible world in the Church. I know where the spirit of all tragedies dwells--in the silence which you dare not break, with even one call for help. I contracted the habit of holding my breath in these years of suspense. Even when my body slept it seemed to me my heart was forever sitting up with Lundy in the dark hours of the night.

This was long before the Great War, but I distinctly recall how I used to wish I could find relief in a real battle, see the dreadful face of my enemy and feel his wounds rather than face the powers and principalities of Lundy’s terrible darkness.

I fell sick under the strain and lay at the very doors of death for a long time, but not wishfully. I survived the predictions of various physicians for no other reason, I believe, than that I felt obliged to live and stand by my husband.

I did it. No one can say I failed him or ever drew back once from the shadows that finally engulfed him. I had written ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife’ and put the crown he so richly deserved upon him before he passed away. I remember being in a hurry to do that.

Nothing was further from my plans than to become a writer, but I must have already begun the practice of studying characters, for I remember all those people whom I knew then, not their faces but their attributes, their inside minds. Otherwise, I am inclined to believe now that this was not an important period in my own mental development. It seems to me that I had very little raiment on my thoughts, not much sweetness or color. That bright and halcyon past which came back to me later in a dark time was eclipsed by some sort of adolescent egotism of the mind. I remember being very smart, which is a form of stupidity. I try not to remember it, but it occurs to me that I may have felt intellectual. I entertained views too noble or too bitter to be true. I must have done some soul-stretching of my mental neck.

Nothing that I have ever written about myself humbles me so much as this confession, for I have observed the same state of mind in others. It is ugly, insincere, and leads to maudlin movements, agitations, and other disorders of our times, especially among women. The wonder to me now is that I did not get the idea that I had a message for the world. God in his mercy saved me from feminine screech of this emotion which so many of us mistake for noble inspiration.