ulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps, mounds,
promontories, away to broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills,
and dimmer beyond and farther, the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a
veil to the illimitable. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of
the service-tree or the white-beam spotted the semicircle of swelling
green Down black and silver. The sun in the valley sharpened his beams
on squares of buttercups, and made a pond a diamond.

'You see, Tony,' Emma said, for a comment on the scene, 'I could envy
Italy for having you, more than you for being in Italy.'

'Feature and colour!' said Diana. 'You have them here, and on a scale
that one can embrace. I should like to build a hut on this point, and
wait for such a day to return. It brings me to life.' She lifted her
eyelids on her friend's worn sweet face, and knowing her this friend
up to death, past it in her hopes, she said bravely, 'It is the Emma
of days and scenes to me! It helps me to forget myself, as I do when I
think of you, dearest; but the subject has latterly been haunting me, I
don't know why, and ominously, as if my nature were about to horrify my
soul. But I am not sentimentalizing, you are really this day and scene
in my heart.'

Emma smiled confidingly. She spoke her reflection: 'The heart must be
troubled a little to have the thought. The flower I gather here tells me
that we may be happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept
beauty. I won't say expel the passions, but keep passion sober, a
trotter in harness.'

Diana caressed the ponies' heads with the droop of her whip: 'I don't
think I know him!' she said.

Between sincerity and a suspicion so cloaked and dull that she did not
feel it to be the opposite of candour, she fancied she was passionless
because she could accept the visible beauty, which was Emma's
prescription and test; and she forced herself to make much of it, cling
to it, devour it; with envy of Emma's contemplative happiness, through
whose grave mind she tried to get to the peace in it, imagining that
she succeeded. The cloaked and dull suspicion weighed within her
nevertheless. She took it for a mania to speculate on herself. There are
states of the crimson blood when the keenest wits are childish, notably
in great-hearted women aiming at the majesty of their sex and fearful of
confounding it by the look direct and the downright word. Yet her nature
compelled her inwardly to phrase th