"You don't quite know what you are, Osmond. There's a good deal of grannie in you. Perhaps that is one of the things I love. You work with your hands. Everything is possible to you, every kind of splendid thing, because you have not been spoiled by artificial life, the ambitions of it, the poor, mean hypocrisies. Strange that I should be talking about labor!"
"Why strange?"
"Because I hated the mention of it while my father lived. But now I seem to have gone back to my old feeling of a kind of pity for them all,—the ones that work blindly out of the light,—I see them as Ivan Gorof saw them, that great sea of the oppressed."
"But not every workingman is oppressed."
"No, no! Not here. But in other countries where they are surging and trying to have their ignorant way. And they are no more to be pitied than the rich. And I keep wishing for them, not money and power and leisure, such as the rich have, but something better, something I wish the rich had, too."
"The heart that sees God, grannie would say."
"Maybe grannie would pray for it, Osmond. Maybe I could sing it—I hope to sing now—maybe you could put it into the land and bring it out in flowers."
"That's poetry!" said Osmond. He was smiling at her unconscious way of showing him how lovely she was and how loving. "I am going now, dear. I am going to take your present home carefully and look at it alone."
She knitted wistful brows a moment. Then she too smiled.
"You will see how valuable it is when you look at it," she said. "It will shine so."