remity wherein the soul and
body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the
arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman.
Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer
abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration
into a sort of slime and merge.

Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished. But it moves
in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the
soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this,
love is a disease.

So Aaron, crossing a certain border-line and finding himself alone
completely, accepted his loneliness or singleness as a fulfilment, a
state of fulfilment. The long fight with Lottie had driven him at last
to himself, so that he was quiet as a thing which has its root deep in
life, and has lost its anxiety. As for considering the lily, it is not
a matter of consideration. The lily toils and spins hard enough, in her
own way. But without that strain and that anxiety with which we try
to weave ourselves a life. The lily is life-rooted, life-central. She
_cannot_ worry. She is life itself, a little, delicate fountain playing
creatively, for as long or as short a time as may be, and unable to
be anxious. She may be sad or sorry, if the north wind blows. But even
then, anxious she cannot be. Whether her fountain play or cease to play,
from out the cold, damp earth, she cannot be anxious. She may only be
glad or sorry, and continue her way. She is perfectly herself, whatever
befall! even if frosts cut her off. Happy lily, never to be saddled with
an _idee fixe_, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or
love or fulfilment. It is not _laisser aller_. It is life-rootedness. It
is being by oneself, life-living, like the much-mooted lily. One toils,
one spins, one strives: just as the lily does. But like her, taking
one's own life-way amidst everything, and taking one's own life-way
alone. Love too. But there also, taking one's way alone, happily alone
in all the wonders of communion, swept up on the winds, but never swept
away from one's very self. Two eagles in mid-air, maybe, like Whitman's
Dalliance of Eagles. Two eagles in mid-air, grappling, whirling, coming
to their intensification of love-oneness there in mid-air. In mid-air
the love consummation. But all the time each lifted on its own wings:
each bearing itself up on its own wings at every