"Her First Love"
Life for her was one outpouring of ardent hope and captivating passion and tender feeling. She is neither reckless nor rash for she is enchanted by what she sees and by what she does not see bewitched by this generous ray that fills her soul and this vitality that dwells in her merciful heart and this world, brimming with beauties of every kind — she is enamored of it and carried away for the sky of intense blue and the sweep of the plains stretching in dazzling colors down to the shore and the lofty mountains in their dark raiment and the open air, which she loves to have toy with her curly hair and her dark face — it too is beautiful in every hour of the hours of night and day.
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Beautiful when it rages, for in its raging is one of the meanings of her own proud soul and gentle when it grows calm, for in it is much of the gentleness of her own feeling and this city, which she visits only rarely —
she loves it with the full measure of its clamor and din and likewise her village, lost in reverie to the tunes of the shepherds' pipes — she loves it in every season of the year for the calm that wraps its evenings, she feels flooding her being with a like calm that her
soul longs for and yearns toward As for the drowsy, moonlit nights, she passes them sleepless, without a trace of weariness indeed with a pleasure to which she counts no other pleasure equal And music, which takes hold of her soul to the point of obsession — its gay strains and its wailing captivate her. And stories, in all their varied kinds, she hears or reads breathless with wonder and ardor. And painting likewise: across all its differing schools, she cannot keep herself from taking its imprint and answering to it so she remains as one dazed and dreaming, whom nothing draws out of that world of hers but some new thing that sheds over her being the first glimmers of a captivating beauty. As for poetry, her soul has a discourse of it, and her soul holds with it a conversation that may run long, and may run short, but it never settles into stillness as if it were these short successive breaths that drive her red blood from the lungs to the heart, upon the lullings of its swift pulsations.
That is why, when she loved, she loved with all the ardor and purity of her being. And when she hated, she hated with all the pride and splendor of her soul. And she had a mother who was not like other mothers. A mother from
whom she took much — even this inward-turning gaiety and even these values of the soul which she will not abandon, though it cost her life and all that is precious And so it was one of the crimes of life, or of the fates, or of chance, that this mother should be taken from her early whereupon she folded in upon herself with a stubborn withdrawal against which the loving father's devices availed nothing. Nor the coddling of family and playmates nor that passion she had bestowed upon life. And all at once her soul turned away from everything she had loved, as though no bond of old