s true. But
is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss."

"With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice are
ephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merely
by living long enough. I, like any other man of my years, have in my
day known more or less every grief which the world breeds; and each
maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that to-day
their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I was an
urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshine
intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant to
look at, and--greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not very
long--I stare at it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of all
imaginable creeds--that if we do nothing very wrong, all human
imbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, will
be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonic
truth--this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker of
this universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible in
dealing with us." He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter
tone. "Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman?
Faith, you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if
it were an oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and
the best of men. I protest her adoration frightens me. What if she
were to find me out?"

"I loved what was divine in you," the woman answered.

"Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine in
me had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity's
owner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret. Then
Judith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me--and Judith
only in all the world!--as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah,
madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights in the low
cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp your
hand--much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the
clutching of a vine--and beg you never to be friends with anything save
sorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys--who
did not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her
father, for all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding
attendance on a fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who sees
in play-writing