"I should have been contented. There's a big difference between contentment and happiness. You can't have learned it, yet."
"Oh, can't I! It's all the difference between—between—well, the difference between this borderland seen on a dark day and seen on a day of sunshine. It's the same landscape, but it doesn't look the same to the eyes or give the same feelings to the heart. The dark-day feelings would be calm and quietly pleasant; the sunshine feelings would be full of thrills and heartbeats—as to-day."
"By Jove, you've hit it!" he exclaimed as if to please me by agreeing. "Full of thrills and heartbeats—as to-day."
"Then you do feel the romance of everything in this sunshine?" I asked, quick to drag a "yes" from him while he was in the mood.
"I should say I did. And I'm not ashamed, with you to back me up. But I've a sneaking idea I should have been ashamed of it with Mrs. West. And I shouldn't have felt the thrills, only a calm, peaceful pleasure, as in the gray days—contentment. I shouldn't have known what I was missing, perhaps. I should have respected myself for outgrowing my enthusiasms. But—in my best moments, Princess, I've pitied people more for not knowing what they miss in life than for missing the things."
"Yes," I answered, "because it's better to know there are beautiful things, and to want them in vain, than grub along without knowing of their existence. But all that's got nothing to do with Mrs. West."
"Perhaps not. Yet it has something to do with me. No need to bother about the connection."
"I won't bother about anything!" I laughed in my joy of life and of motoring, which seemed one and indivisible just then. "I'm wrapped up in the magic golden web that Sir Walter Scott and Burns have woven round every mile of this land across the border—our land, yours and mine."
"So am I, caught in the web, lost in it—to my own surprise." He laughed as he drove, his eyes alert and young. "Burns, by the way, came to Ecclefechan, where we're arriving now. He had an uproarious time, and wrote verses to the Lass of Ecclefechan, which shows the place must have been a good deal livelier then than now. Or else, which is as likely, he had a faculty of squeezing the juice out of the driest, most unpromising fruit—the same faculty you have."
"Perhaps the fruit dried up later," I suggested. "Burns died soon after Carlyle was born, didn't he? And maybe people began to be primmer when they were forgetting his influence."