ngling
quality underlying a faint veil of warmth. Everywhere mist and dew lay
on the countryside like the bloom on a grape. The gardener's boy walking
across the lawn had left his footprints stamped in emerald on the grass.

Smiling intimately to herself she got into her bath, wondering vaguely
at the miracle of water, enjoying impersonally the cool whiteness of her
body, doing tricks of perspective with her arms and legs.

She dressed slowly with indolent rhythmical movements, indifferently
aware of her effortless inevitable perfection.

Even more slowly she walked down the staircase out through the open
window on to the grey terrace. Somehow she felt that she was violating
the morning, forcing the human on to the divine. Sipping the day she
walked towards the almonds with their pink blush of blossom bursting
through the brown; turning round her head she saw the double cherry, its
branches nearly breaking under their load of snow. And at the roots of
every tree uninvited primroses and violets were crowding out the earth.

She followed the winding terraces towards the gleaming river, past
fluttering daffodils and wandering narcissi, over riotous anemones and
bright sturdy scyllae, shaking showers of diamonds off the grasses as she
went.

The river lay like a long satin streamer, a curling ribbon dropped on
the meadows. And everywhere, hidden and vibrating, was an urgency of
life: buds bursting into blossom, birds bursting into flight.

Gradually the veil was lifting from the morning, the sun was rubbing the
bloom off it as a child rubs sleep from his eyes.

She retraced her steps, putting down her feet with the delicate
fastidiousness of a cat in order not to tread on a flower. "I'm alone
with you," she said shyly and ecstatically to the day. Never before had
she had the Spring to herself. Always there had been the children (now
on a visit) dragging plans and occupations, games, picnics, and bicycles
across the pure joy of living, or her husband like a violin very close
to her ear tearing her nerves to shreds with poignant urgent beauty.

Looking dispassionately at her life, it seemed to her a slum of human
relationships, airless, over-crowded, a dusty arena where psychological
acrobats perform by artificial light. And always that dragging of the
general down to the particular, that circumscribing of everything by the
personal, every rose a token, the moon something to kiss by, flowers
prostituted into bouquets.