m the
perfume of the growing grasses waving over heavy-laden clover and
laughing veronica, hiding the green finches, baffling the bee; from
rose-lined hedge, woodbine, and cornflower, azure blue, where
yellowing wheat stalks crowd up under the shadow of green firs. All
the devious brooklets' sweetness where the iris stays the sunlight;
all the wild woods hold of beauty; all the broad hills of thyme and
freedom thrice a hundred years repeated.

"A hundred years of cowslips, bluebells, violets; purple spring and
golden autumn; sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings; the night
immortal; all the rhythm of time unrolling. A chronicle unwritten and
past all power of writing; who shall preserve a record of the petals
that fell from the roses a century ago? The swallows to the house-tops
three hundred--times think of that! Thence she sprang, and the
world yearns toward her beauty as to flowers that are past. The
loveliness of seventeen is centuries old. That is why passion is
almost sad."

If you have understood and appreciated the beauty of harebells
three hundred times repeated; if the quality of the roses, of the
music, of the ruddy mornings and evenings of the world has ever
touched your heart; if all beauty were passing, and you were given
these things to hold in your arms before the world slipped away, would
you give them up?

CHAPTER VIII

The significance of the material and spiritual changes which
sometimes overtake us are not very clear at the time. A sense of
shock, a sense of danger, and then apparently we subside to old ways,
but the change has come. Never again, here or elsewhere, will we be
the same. Jennie pondering after the subtle emotional turn which her
evening's sympathetic expedition had taken, was lost in a vague
confusion of emotions. She had no definite realization of what social
and physical changes this new relationship to the Senator might
entail. She was not conscious as yet of that shock which the
possibility of maternity, even under the most favorable conditions,
must bring to the average woman. Her present attitude was one of
surprise, wonder, uncertainty; and at the same time she experienced a
genuine feeling of quiet happiness. Brander was a good man; now he was
closer to her than ever. He loved her. Because of this new
relationship a change in her social condition was to inevitably
follow. Life was to be radically different from now on--was
different at this moment. Brander assured