His window looked out on the back of the house. Close to it were the trees which had drawn their fitful pencillings on the ceiling above his bed; and beyond was a small patch of vegetables, divided in oblongs by currant and gooseberry bushes, and fenced off from other vegetable gardens which sloped up the hillside to the irregular fringes of a wood. More trees—trees everywhere, trees taller, fuller and more heavy-branched, he thought, than those of his native prairies. Up the hillside they domed themselves in great bluish masses, one against the other, like the roofs of some mysterious city built of leaves. Vance was pleased with that fancy too, and would have liked to stop and put it into verse, as well as his grandmother's idea about the lilacs. The rhyming faculty, long abeyant, stirred in him again under the spell of the unfamiliar scene, and the caress of the summer morning, and he forgot about his haste to leave his room, and his scruples lest breakfast should have been kept for him, and sat down at the table in the window, pulling his pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket. Since his little-boyhood his pockets had never been without scraps of paper.

"Arcane, aloof, and secret as the soul—" He liked that, for the first line of the poem about the city built of leaves, which was of course a forest. Secret as the soul. There were times when his own soul was like a forest, full of shadows and murmurs—arcane, aloof—a place to lose one's way in, a place fearsome, almost, to be alone in. And then: secret. That too was true. He often felt as if his own soul were a stranger inside of him, a stranger speaking a language he had never learned, or had forgotten. And there again was a good idea; the idea of the mysterious stranger within one's self, closer than one's bones and yet with a face and speech forever unknown to one. His heart was beating with a rush of inarticulate eloquence, words and waves of feeling struggling to fit into each other and become thought and music.

"Heavy with all the scent of summers gone—" how would that do for the lilac? No, too heavy. He wanted to say that the mere scent of the lilac was rich enough for bees to make honey out of it; to say that lightly, whirringly, like bees humming about before they settle. And then one organ note at the close, where the box of ointment is broken, and Christ likens the Magdalen's gesture to the perfume of holiness, the lovely fragrance it should give out, but so often does not. Scentless holiness … there too was something to write about. How one image beckoned another! And he couldn't stop them, often couldn't detain them long enough to trace their lineaments before they vanished… .