We went out silently, after I had taken a last, long look into
the bundle.--Lisbeth had come into my world.
* * * * *
Some twenty years were to go by before I was to realize the significance
of the scene that I had witnessed that winter morning at the old frame
farmhouse. It was the year of my return to America with Jim Shepherd,
whose career as a rising young painter had just begun to be heralded,
that I felt impelled to revisit the place of my childhood. Not my least
interest lay in seeing Lisbeth again. I remembered her as a fragile
upstanding girl of twelve with soft hair the color of dead leaves and
gray inquiring eyes. But whatever it was that I was to find I was
conscious that I would see it with new appreciation of values. For if my
eight years of medical work abroad had sharpened my discernment, even
more had my intimacy with Jim Shepherd swept my mind clean of prejudice
and casuistry.
To strangers Jim must often have appeared naive and undevious. The fact
was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the
undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness
had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was like entering
another element. It left you a little flat. That candor and eagerness of
his at first balked you, it made negligible your traditions of thought
and speech.
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