The Promise of Air by Algernon Blackwood

To others she was doubtless an exasperating being. To her father alone since he saw in her something he had lost but was now recovering, something he therefore idealised, seeing in perfected form what was actually but a germ still to her father she expressed a little of that higher carelessness, or wisdom, that he had touched in boyhood and now yearningly desired again.

'Oh, she's all in the air,' people said. And it was truer than they knew. She had an affinity with all that flew. This bird-idea was in her heart and blood. Whatever flew, whatever rose above the ground, whatever passed swiftly, suddenly, from place to place, without deliberation, without calculation, without weighing risk and profit this appealed to her. Yet there must be steadiness in it somewhere too, and it must get somewhere. A swallow or a butterfly she approved, but not a bat. The latter, for all its darting swiftness, was a sham; it was an earth-crawler really, frightened into ridiculous movement by finding itself aloft like a blown leaf; like a flying fish, it was wrong and out of place. It merely flew round and round in stupid, broken circles without rhythm. But the former were perfect. They were ideal. They were almost spirits.