Miss Euphrasia could no more help talking so--given the right
circumstances to draw her forth--than she could help breathing. Her
whole nature was fluid to the truth, as the atoms she spoke of.
Talking with her, you saw, as in a divine kaleidoscope, the gleams
and shiftings and combinings of heavenly and internal things; shown
in simplest movings and relations of most real and every day
experience and incident.

But she never went on--and "went over," exhorting. She did not
believe in _discourses_, she said, even from the pulpit--very much.
She believed in a _sermon_, and letting it go. And a sermon is just
a word; as the Word gives itself, in some fresh manna-particle, to
any soul.

So when the girls stood silent, as girls will, not knowing how to
break a pause that has come upon such speaking, she broke it
herself, with a very simple question; a question of mere little
business that she had come to ask Dot.

"Were the little under-kerchiefs done?"

It was just the same sweet, cheery tone; she dropped nothing, she
took up nothing, turning from the inward to the outside. It was all
one quiet, harmonious sense of wholeness; living, and expression of
living. That was what made Miss Euphrasia's "words" chord so
pleasantly, always, without any jar, upon whatever string was being
played; and the impulse and echo of them to run on through the music
afterward, as one clear bell-stroke marking an accent, will seem to
send its lingering impression through the unaccented measures