rstanding, for which it longs obscurely, and must ever
be uneasy, till it finds it. For just as no misfortunes whatever can
avail to mar the bliss of the man who has beside him the absolute
sympathy of his feminine ideal, so on the other hand no worldly
success of any kind can compensate for its absence. All particular
causes of happiness or misery are swallowed up and sink into
insignificance and nullity compared with this: this present, they
disappear: this absent, each alone is sufficient to wreck the soul,
fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world.
Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness can
spring. And the old Hindoo mythology, which is far deeper in its
simplicity than the later idealistic pessimism, expresses this
beautifully by giving to every god his other half; the supreme
instance of which dualism is the divine Pair, the Moony-crested god
and his inseparable other half, the Daughter of the Snow: so
organically symbolised that they coalesce indistinguishably into one:
the _Arddanari_, the Being half Male half Female, He whose left half
is his wife. That is the true ideal: cut in two, and destroyed, by the
dismal inhuman monotheism of later sophistical speculation.

* * * * *

It was long before I understood this: the solution came to me
suddenly, of its own accord, as all profound solutions always come,
apparently by accident: like a "fluke" in a game of skill, where often
unskilfulness unintentionally does something that could not be
achieved by any degree of skill whatever, short of the divine.[1] And
the two things that combined to produce my spark of illumination were,
as it so fell out, the two things that mean most to me, a sunset and a
child. The child was looking at the sunset, and I was looking at the
child. Some readers of these stories have been introduced to her
before, and will be obliged to me for renewing the acquaintance, as
they would be to the postman who brought them news of an old friend.

The sunset was like every other sunset, the garment of a dying deity,
and a gift of god: but it had a special peculiarity of its own, and it
was this strange peculiarity that arrested the attention of the child.
For children are little animals, _terram spectantia_, taking sunsets
and other commonplaces such as mother, father, home, furniture and
carpets, generally for granted, being as a rule absorbed in the great
things