She bent in speaking to look through three or four small canvases that stood with their faces to the wall.
"I want to show you the pair to my Up-Hill picture. It's another Rossetti, Amor Mundi; and the contrast pleases me. I've taken the opening lines:
"'Oh where are you going, with your love-locks flowing,
On the west wind blowing, along this valley track?'
'The down-hill path is easy; come with me, an' it please ye;
We shall escape the up-hill, by never turning back.'
So they two went together, in glowing August weather,
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right . .'
There now, can't you see them going down and down . . . ?"
With a quick turn of the wrist she brought the picture into view, and set it on the table in a good light.
"Can't you feel the soft wind against their faces, . . the ease, the swiftness, and the thrill of it all; the thrill of yielding to earth and the beauty of earth, of giving up for a while one's futile strugglings to reach the moon?"
Honor stood silent, gazing at the picture with rapt interest. To this deep-hearted passionate woman, whose sympathies stretched upward and downward along the whole gamut of human feeling, its appeal was far stronger than Quita—in whom passion was mainly an imaginative quality—was likely to realise. For the small picture was heavy with heat and colour, and the glamour of high mid-summer; the sky's blue intensity glowing between masses of white thunderous cloud; the hillsides clothed in their August splendour of purple, and pink, and green: and down the white track that sloped to the valley a man and a woman, hand in hand, the woman leading, appeared to be coming straight out of the picture. Her flying hair, and the sweep of her draperies, showed the speed of their going; and the ecstasy of it shone in the faces of both.
"It's a powerful little poem," Quita exclaimed. "As they go on they meet with grisly portents, the track gets steeper, and they are afraid. But by that time it is 'too steep for hill-mounting, and too late for cost-counting; the down-hill path is easy, but there's no turning back.'"
Honor gave a little shiver.
"It's a wonderful bit of work," she said. "But is it always the man who leads up, and the woman who leads down, Quita?"