"Perhaps, honey," she said, "you'll find happiness in doing without it. At any rate—you seem right happy at the prospect of not being happy."
Sophy rose and, kneeling down beside her, leaned her head on that kind breast.
"Do you know, Sue," she said dreamily, "after all, it's rather wonderful to feel that one has done with love, and yet finds life worth while."
"Is it, dear?" said Sue.
"Yes, it is. You know Socrates was glad when he had passed the age of love. Now I understand why that was. I never did before."
Sue Pickett said nothing, only stroked the dark head upon her breast. But a rather cryptic smile stirred her lips. She was thinking that from all she had read and heard, two beings could hardly differ more essentially than Sophy and the Sage of Athens.
XLVI
Sophy spent the rest of that summer and the following winter at Sweet-Waters. She did not wish to go among people so soon after her divorce, besides she felt the need of self-adjustment to her new relations with life.
That sense of being unreal in a world of unreality, which she had mentioned to Susan Pickett on the day of the divorce, lasted for some time. Then, in the early autumn—in her favourite month of October—began a recrudescence of the imperishable passion for life as opposed to mere existence, that lent her always the elemental charm of fire. Many natures shine in the great dim of circumstance, but with light differently derived. Some are, as one might put it, phosphorescent. In others one divines the pinch of star-dust in the clay—still luminous, still perfervid, as when the cosmic nebula first spun the white hot core of things. It was this mystic fire that glowed again in Sophy, burning clearer for the ash beneath it, even as the humbler, yet still sacred fire of hearths, burns clearer in like case. It was as if in resigning her desire for one supremely personal love, Love itself had drawn nearer. Motherhood meant for her now, not only her feeling for her little son, but an aching towards all unmothered things. It was not welt-schmerz, this feeling—welt passion rather.... She was like one who has lived for years in a lovely, doorless, painted house, lit by perfumed candles—then one day steps through a sudden break in its wall to face the tremendous sea. Yes—life lay like that before her—perilous but to be drowned in rather than left unessayed—unsailed. The cosmic romance was upon her. She no longer belittled romance to a love-tale—rather it was the adventure of a creative god—Zeus as Poet. And this new, impassioned desire to live fully, largely, universally, so confused her in the beginning, that she hardly knew where first to turn—so vast were her ignorances—so clamorous the wave-like voices that called from every side.