“Don’t wonder. Beauty is not to be found by sorting out dustbins. Beauty is in the woods, Wynne. Listen! You can hear the leaves in the tree above us whispering of her, and the little waves in the pool yonder, are leaping up lest they should miss her as she passes by. Can’t you feel the wonder of her everywhere, now in the spring, when she leaps splendid from her winter hiding? D’y’know, when April’s here I throw open my window and look up into the blue and then I see her riding on a cloud. You know the kind of cloud—the great white sort, which brings the summer from the seas. Ha! Yes, and I shout my homage as I brush my hair, and sometimes my poor man Parsons thinks I’m cracked. But what’s the matter if she smiles—for she’s a smiling lady if ever there was one, and her breath is like a breeze which is filtered through a copse of violets.”
“Oh Lord, you are just the same old Uncle Clem as ever,” laughed Wynne.
“Damn your eyes,” came the colloquial rejoinder—“if you’re not patronizing me!”
“Not I. Believe me, I wouldn’t have you different, but perhaps I’ve changed a bit, and these dream pictures aren’t so real as they were.”
“Then make ’em real—they’re worth it.”
Wynne hesitated, then said:
“I’m beginning to see the world as it is, and it doesn’t look like that any longer. I see it as a vast machine built up of cranks and gears, and bolts and cogs—some odd, but mostly even. A thing of wheels and reciprocal activity, for ever revolving and for ever returning to the point from which it started. It’s hard to believe in fairies when one thinks like that.”
“Then don’t think like that, or, if you do, think of the energy that moves the machine—that’s where the mystery and the essence lie. The wheels are nothing—it is the power which drives ’em that counts. Why, heavens above! that should be the task for you, and such as you—to find and refine the essence, to know and increase the power. For God’s sake don’t scorn a thing because it goes round, but give it a push that it may revolve faster. That’s the job! and a fine job too. It’s easy to acquire cheap fame by jeering at a man because he goes to bed at night and gets up in the morning—easy—but no good. Give him something to get up early for and sleep the better for; that’s the way to earn your own repose.”
“And you were the man who first showed me a satyr,” said Wynne.
“And I was the man who told you of the Purple Patch,” came the reply.