She stopped to look at him and exclaim, "Why, you're listening! You're
interested. Neale, I believe you are the only person in the world who
can really pay attention to what somebody else says. Everybody else just
goes on thinking his own thoughts."
He smiled at this fancy, and said, "Go on."
"Well, I don't know whether that feeling was already in me, waiting for
something to express it, or whether that phrase in the poem started it.
But it was, for ever so long, the most important thing in the world to
me. I was about fourteen years old then, and of course, being a good
deal with Catholics, I thought probably it was religious ecstasy that
was going to be the great flood that would brim my cup full. I used to
go up the hill in Bayonne to the Cathedral every day and stay there for
hours, trying to work up an ecstasy. I managed nearly to faint away once
or twice, which was something of course. But I couldn't feel that
great tide I'd dreamed of. And then, little by little . . . oh, lots of
things came between the idea and my thinking about it. Mother was . . .
I've told you how Mother was at that time. And what an unhappy time it
was at home. I was pretty busy at the house because she was away so
much. And Father and I hung together because there wasn't anybody else
to hang to: and all sorts of ugly things happened, and I didn't have the
time or the heart to think about being 'an urn too full.'"
She stopped, smiling happily, as though those had not been tragic words
which he had just spoken, thinking not of them but of something else,
which now came out, "And then, oh Neale, that day, on the piazza in
front of St. Peter's, when we stood together, and felt the spray of the
fountains blown on us, and you looked at me and spoke out. . . . Oh, Neale,
Neale, what a moment to have lived through! Well, when we went on into
the church, and I knelt there for a while, so struck down with joy that
I couldn't stand on my feet, all those wild bursts of excitement, and
incredulity and happiness, that kept surging up and drenching me . . . I
had a queer feeling, that awfully threadbare feeling of having been
there before, or felt that before; that it was familiar, although it was
so new. Then it came to me, 'Why, I have it, what I used to pray for.
Now at last I am the urn too full!' And it was true, I could feel, just
as I dreamed, the upsurging of the feeling, brimming over, boiling up,
brimming over. . . . And another phrase came into my mind, an English one.
I said to myself, 'The fullness of life.' Now I know what it is."