Sublime

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a

and having a minute ago nearly gone mad with fear, she was now suffused with a deep slow ecstasy at being one with her body and the earth and everything that was matter.

the beautiful devotion of so young and weak a creature had shed a ray of its own on the inanimate things around, and made them beautiful as itself;

She walks home in a daze, thinking of the last thing Olivia said to her. “Gifts are fragile. You must never entrust yours to people who might break it.” She doesn’t say who she might be thinking of, and Barbara doesn’t need her to. She has what she needs and doesn’t expect to return to the Harris house again.

“It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar. It is true that among her contemporaries she passed for a young women of extraordinary profundity. She had a theory that one should be