"All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey."
Yes—she is gone; they have quarrelled. Or rather, since it does not take two to do that wretched deed, she has quarrelled. It was some little thing that he said—neither sneer nor vaunt, nor reproach nor taunt:
"And the friends were friend and foe!"
She went away, and she has not come back, and it is three months ago.
One cannot help suspecting that the little thing he said, which was not so many things, must then have been something peculiarly tactless! This girl was not, like some of us, devoid of humour—that much is clear: laughter lived in her as in its home. What had he said? Whatever it was, he "did not mean it." But that is frequently the sting of stings. Spontaneity which hurts us hurts far more than malice can—for it is more evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or the too-little. . . . Well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly, she had gone, and still is gone—and he sits marvelling. Three months! Is she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, they had been one person!
"Me, do you leave aghast
With the memories We amassed?"
Just for "a moment's spite." . . . She ought to have understood.
"Love, if you knew the light
That your soul casts in my sight,
How I look to you
For the pure and true,
And the beauteous and the right—"
But so had she looked to him, and he had shown her "a moment's spite." . . . Yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this against the other memories. Things like that are indeed for ever happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. The eye can be blurred by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear. But that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. It is different with love.
"Wrong in the one thing rare—
Oh, it is hard to bear!"