The path grows slippery with mud, and umbrellas collide. Sudden
jets of water from spouts overhead splash on her startled pavement. In her
dismay, she takes it for the jest of an unmannerly scheme of creation.
The spring breeze, gone astray in her coil of contortions, stumbles like a
drunken vagabond against angle and corner, filling the dusty air with
scraps of paper and rag. "What fury of foolishness! Are the Gods gone mad?"
she exclaims in indignation.
But the daily refuse from the houses on both sides--scales of fish mixed
with ashes, vegetable peelings, rotten fruit, and dead rats--never rouse
her to question, "Why should these things be?"
She accepts every stone of her paving. But from between their chinks
sometimes a blade of grass peeps up. That baffles her. How can solid facts
permit such intrusion?
On a morning when at the touch of autumn light her houses wake up into
beauty from their foul dreams, she whispers to herself, "There is a
limitless wonder somewhere beyond these buildings."
But the hours pass on; the households are astir; the maid strolls back from
the market, swinging her right arm and with the left clasping the basket of
provisions to her side; the air grows thick with the smell and smoke of
kitchens.
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