“If only I had been given the chance even to be made as unhappy as you are making your father, dear, I should have loved it so. But it was denied me, and by no fault of mine. So I am learning, I hope, not to grumble. Ah, but it is hard sometimes, and I think I miss the joys of love as you would count joys, Helen, less than I miss what you would count its sorrows. But those are its opportunities. Dear, its possibilities in self-denial and self-abandonment. That is Love triumphant, not crowned with roses, but crowned with sharp, beloved thorns. And the tragedy of love is when there is none for whom it can sacrifice itself.” She stroked Helen’s hand again gently. “Make yourself complete, dear,” she said; “there I am entirely at one with you. But, remember, our souls are like rose-trees, I think. You cut and prune them, if you are a wise gardener, for you know that by the cutting, the renunciation, you do not check or hinder your development, but you encourage it. You will be the more fragrant, the fuller of blossom by that which you might hastily say was a piece of cruelty, a stunting of your growth.” Her kind eyes looked away from Helen, and out over the sun-baked lawn, bordered with flower-beds, in which, clearly to comply with preconceived notions of a garden on the part of a gardener, lobelias were set in a formal row in front, and behind them terrible, speckled calceolarias and hard, crude geraniums. That garden had often seemed to Helen very typical of her aunt: it was orderly and completely conventional. Beyond Dr. Arne’s study windows looked from the red-brick house across the grass, and from where they sat she could see him at a table littered with books and manuscripts, with head bent over his work, or rising now and then to consult some book of reference which he took from the volume-lined walls. That sight, also, had often seemed to her very typical; the Cambridge professor was at his work (as, indeed, it was most right and proper that he should be), but that to him was all. His little life was bounded with books; on all sides stretched limitless deserts of particles and chorus-metres. But now, for the first time, Helen knew how erroneous all her judgments with regard to Aunt Susan had been,--for a real heart beat there, and it was somebody, somebody very distinct and individual, who ordered dinner and played picquet. Her life was not negative, emotionless; it was only her own obtuseness of perception that had so labelled it. Instead it was sad; in spite of all its quiet cheerfulness it was as sad as the level rays of the sun striking hazily across the lawn; as sad as the grey spires of Kings which rose against the clear, hot blue of the sky.