that love has finished
me, I have found my real self once more. I am no longer the bewildered
woman, embarrassed by a thousand new sensations, lost in the maze of your
illusions, but I am Jessica again, as remote from you, by moods, as the
little green buds that swing high upon the boughs of these trees, wrapped
yet in their brown winter furs. I mean that now I am able even to detach
my thoughts from you at will and to live with the sort of personal
emphasis I had before I knew you. I think it is because at last I am so
sure of you that I can afford to forget you! How do you like that?

Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does not
everything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be covered
soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with
many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained.
No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly
procession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year,
inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as
for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to
grow a green wreath about my head by next spring!

Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where there
is so much space between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow for
him to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent but
acquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will be
happier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watches
the miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally,
however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some one
should be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow my
alms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaic
indifference with which he endures these caresses, you _could_ not be
jealous!

XXXIX

PHILIP TO JESSICA

I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener
and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil
was to care for the world's early-blooming flowers. But what was our first
great parent to me?

There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies show--

and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the
one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour