"Yes," she replied, smiling sadly, and then, mocking my bad Scotch, "and do ye ken that ither one, a native too of that country where, as you say, poetry is a rare plant; that great wanderer over many lands and seas, seeker after summer everlasting, who died thousands of miles from home in a tropical island, and was borne to his grave on a mountain top by the dark-skinned barbarous islanders, weeping and lamenting their dead Tusitala, and the lines he wrote—do you remember?
Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of my home! and to hear again the call—
Hear about the graves of the martyrs, the pee-wees crying,
And hear no more at all!"
"Oh, I was foolish to quote those lines on a Scotch burn to you, knowing how you would take such a thing up! For you are the very soul of sadness—a sadness that is like a cruelty—and for all your love, my sister, you would have killed me with your sadness had I not refused to listen so many many times!"
"No! No! No! Listen now to what I had to say without interrupting me again: All this about the villages, viewed from up there where the lark sings, is but a preliminary—a little play to deceive yourself and me. For, all the time you are thinking of other things, serious and some exceedingly sad—of those who live not in villages but in dreadful cities, who are like motherless men who have never known a mother's love and have never had a home on earth. And you are like one who has come upon a cornfield, ripe for the harvest with you alone to reap it. And viewing it you pluck an ear of corn, and rub the grains out in the palm of your hand, and toss them up, laughing and playing with them like a child, pretending you are thinking of nothing, yet all the time thinking—thinking of the task before you. And presently you will take to the reaping and reap until the sun goes down, to begin again at sunrise to toil and sweat again until evening. Then, lifting your bent body with pain and difficulty, you will look to see how little you have done, and that the field has widened and now stretches away before you to the far horizon. And in despair you will cast the sickle away and abandon the task."
"What then, O wise sister, would you have me do?"
"Leave it now, and save yourself this fresh disaster and suffering."
"So be it! I cannot but remember that there have been many disasters—more than can be counted on the fingers of my two hands—which I would have saved myself if I had listened when I turned a deaf ear to you. But tell me, do you mind just a little more innocent play on my part—just a little picture of, say, one of the villages viewed a while ago from under the cloud—or perhaps two?"
And Psyche, my sister, having won her point and pacified me, and conquered my scruples and gloom, and seeing me now submissive, smiled a gracious consent.