The first time she saw these portraits, she turned and walked rapidly out of the parlor. She had enough troubles of her own without bearing the troubles of all these faces. Later on she could confront them with equanimity—that company of the pallid, the desperately sick, the unaccountably uncomfortable. All looked, not as though there had been a death in the family, but a death in the collection: only the same grief could have so united them as mourners. And whatever else they lacked, each showed two hands, the full number, placed where they were sure to be counted.
She was in the midst of this psychological reversion to ancestral gayety when David arrived. Each looked quickly at the other with unconscious fear. Within a night and a day each had drawn nearer to the other; and each secretly inquired whether the other now discovered this nearness. Gabriella saw at least that he, too, was excited with happiness.
He appeared to her for the first time handsome. He WAS better looking. When one approaches the confines of love, one nears the borders of beauty. Nature sets going a certain work of decoration, of transformation. Had David about this time been a grouse, he would probably have displayed a prodigious ruff. Had he been a bulbul and continued to feel as he did, he would have poured into the ear of night such roundelays as had never been conceived of by that disciplined singer. Had he been a master violinist, he would have been unable to play a note from a wild desire to flourish the bow. He had long stood rooted passively in the soil of being like a century plant when it is merely keeping itself in existence. But latterly, feeling in advance the approach of the Great Blossoming Hour, he had begun to shoot up rapidly into a lofty life-stalk; there were inches of the rankest growth on him within the last twenty-four hours. To-night he was not even serious in his conversation; and therefore he was the more awkward. His emotions were unmanageable; much more his talk. But she who witnesses this awkwardness and understands—does she ever fail to pardon?
"Last night," he said with a droll twinkle, after the evening was about half spent, "there was one subject I did not speak to you about—Man's place in Nature. Have you ever thought about that?"
"I've been too busy thinking about my place in the school!" said Gabriella, laughing—Gabriella who at all times was simplicity and clearness.
"You see Nature does nothing for Man except what she enables him to do for himself. In this way she has made a man of him; she has given him his resources and then thrown him upon them. Beyond that she cares nothing, does nothing, provides, arranges nothing. I used to think, for instance, that the greenness of the earth was intended for his eyes—all the loveliness of spring. On the contrary, she merely gave him an eye which has adapted itself to get pleasure out of the greenness. The beauty of spring would have been the same, year after year, century after century, had he never existed. And the blue of the sky—I used to think it was hung about the earth for his sake; and the colors of the clouds, the great sunsets. But the blueness of the sky is nothing but the dust of the planet floating deep around it, too light to sink through the atmosphere, but reflecting the rays of the sun. These rays fall on the clouds and color them. It would all have been so, had Man never been born. The earth's springs of drinking water, refreshing showers, the rainbow on the cloud,—they would have been the same, had no human being ever stood on this planet to claim them for ages as the signs of providence and of covenant."
Gabriella had her own faith as to the rainbow.
"So, none of the other animals was made for Man," resumed David, who seemed to have some ulterior purpose in all this. "I used to think the structure and nature of the ass were given him that he might be adapted to bear Man's burdens; they were given him that he might bear his own burdens. Horses were not made for cavalry. And a camel—I never doubted that he was a wonderful contrivance to enable man to cross the desert; he is a wonderful contrivance in order that the contrivance itself may cross the desert."
"I hope I may never have to use one," said Gabriella, "when I commence to ride again. I prefer horses and carriages—though I suppose you would say that only the carriage was designed for me and that I had no right to be drawn in that way."
"Some day a horse may be designed for you, just as the carriage is. We do not use horses on railroads now; we did use them at first in Kentucky. Sometime you may not use horses in your carriage. You may have a horse that was designed for you."