"You are an old woman to be working like this," I ventured.
She looked at me with that strange, unblinking gaze, and she
thought and spoke with the slow deliberateness that characterized
everything about her, as if well aware of an eternity that was hers
and in which there was no need for haste. Again I was impressed by
the enormous certitude of her. In this eternity that seemed so
indubitably hers, there was time and to spare for safe-footing and
stable equilibrium--for certitude, in short. No more in her
spiritual life than in carrying the hundredweights of grain was
there a possibility of a misstep or an overbalancing. The feeling
produced in me was uncanny. Here was a human soul that, save for
the most glimmering of contacts, was beyond the humanness of me.
And the more I learned of Margaret Henan in the weeks that followed
the more mysteriously remote she became. She was as alien as a
far-journeyer from some other star, and no hint could she nor all
the countryside give me of what forms of living, what heats of
feeling, or rules of philosophic contemplation actuated her in all
that she had been and was.
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