Quotation from: The Valley of the Moon

Written by: Jack London


This, too, was beyond her. But she breathed the beauty of it.
Bacchus, and Pandora and Psyche--talismans to conjure with! But
alas! the necromancy was her mother's. Strange, meaningless words
that meant so much! Her marvelous mother had known their meaning.
Saxon spelled the three words aloud, letter by letter, for she
did not dare their pronunciation; and in her consciousness
glimmered august connotations, profound and unthinkable. Her mind
stumbled and halted on the star-bright and dazzling boundaries of
a world beyond her world in which her mother had roamed at will.
Again and again, solemnly, she went over the four lines. They
were radiance and light to the world, haunted with phantoms of
pain and unrest, in which she had her being. There, hidden among
those cryptic singing lines, was the clue. If she could only
grasp it, all would be made clear. Of this she was sublimely
confident. She would understand Sarah's sharp tongue, her unhappy
brother, the cruelty of Charley Long, the justness of the
bookkeeper's beating, the day-long, month-long, year-long toil at
the ironing-board.

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