We always thought, she and I, that we should more or less take to one another. Mutual friends told us so, and there was evidence to support the statement. We approved what they carried back and forth between us of our respective habits and opinions; and once I saw a scrap of her interesting handwriting conveying a view in terms very net. Constantly we were made to feel that upon the basis of human intercourse--the delicate terms of which who can quite expose?--we had things to give each other, and constantly we said with intention, “Next summer I must really manage to meet her.” That is all I knew of Cousin Christina, except that life had offered her, somehow, less than she had a title to, and that she spent a great deal of time in her garden. And then--“on sait trop de cela, que les heures sont comptées à l’homme qui doit mourir, et on agit comme si le trésor de ces heures était inépuisable, l’occasion indéfiniment renouvable et nos amis éternels.”[5] Cousin Christina died last year, and we had never met. It will be judged how much I value her visits now, now that she has so far to come, and her efforts to make me understand; we who remain are so deaf. There were many points at which the world irritated her while she was conditioned in it; and I think the remoteness of this place appeals to her in her freedom; she is pleased in its great lines and vast spaces which yet hold just the touch of human enterprise and affection which she too thought essential, here in my garden. She seems, at all events, to belong to the vague, as if she loved it, and of course I can never lay my hand on her. She is devoted to the garden, constantly she trails about it, having nothing to say to me, with precisely that attitude toward a rose and that hand under a top-heavy aster which separates the true lover from the mere admirer. Dahlias swing free as she passes, and leaves that keep the sun off the convolvuluses get out of their way. It is not the wind, it is Cousin Christina. She is more intimate with the flowers than I; almost invariably, when I show her anything new in bloom she informs me “I saw that yesterday.” She does not seem to think it a liberty to see another person’s flowers before the person herself. I criticise her there.