“‘Delilah,’ said Auden Spoon-bill, ‘since we are here eating lotus flowers, life is very fine, isn’t it?’
“‘Oh, very fine—yes, very fine,’ said Delilah, and was thrilled.
“‘You are a so dear friend,’ said Auden Spoon-bill.
“‘Yes,’ said Delilah, and was not thrilled.
“‘Life,’ said Auden Spoon-bill, ‘is pretty fine, no matter how it is arranged.’
“‘But life is a very strange thing,’ said Delilah. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how strange I have found it. For one thing, I may have what is not my heart’s desire, and what is my heart’s desire I may not have.’
“‘It is strange,’ admitted Auden Spoon-bill. ‘But why have any heart’s desires aside from what is already yours in this fine, fair world?’
“‘One can not rule one’s heart,’ cried Delilah. ‘One’s heart goes on before one’s mind can stop to think. One’s heart rushes in before everything. One’s heart plays with brilliant-colored things when all else is dead-color. One’s heart loves——’
“But Delilah never finished. Before their eyes rose up a magnificent wall—a wall of water that was fire and cloud and silver, and in it were ineffable rainbows of the purple that gathers up the soul in its brilliance and shows it wondrous possibilities; and in it were lines of the pale lavender that caresses the senses—and one breathes from it almost a fragrance of heliotrope; and in it were broad sheets of deep black and dazzling white that were of the seeming of life and death; and in it, last of all, was a world of infinite green: it had come from a place of great things; it had come to a place where all went down before it, where lives exulted but shrank from it because of its green.