For Nixie came back, too, gay and glorious like the rest of the world—sometimes dressed in blossoms of lilac or laburnum, sometimes with skirts of daisies and feet resting upon the Little Winds, sometimes with the soft hood of darkness over her head, the cloak of night about her shoulders, the stars caught all shivering in her hair, and dusk in the deeps of her eyes.... His life became ‘inner’ in the best sense—a Life within a Life; not given over to useless dreaming, but ever drawing from the inner one the sustenance that provided the driving force for the outer one: the mystic as man of action! The Wind of Inspiration blew for him now always, and steadily; but it was no longer the little wind that stirred the measure of his personal emotion into stammering verse, but the big, eternal wind that ‘blew the stars to flame,’ and at the same time impelled him irresistibly along the path of High A’venture to the loss of Self in work for others.... ‘Then why is it we are in the body—and spend so much time there?’ he asked in one of those intimate and mysterious conversations he held with the child to the very end of his life. ‘Why need the soul descend to such clumsy confinings?’ For their talk was very close now about ‘real things,’ and neither found any difficulty in the words of question or answer. ‘To get experience that can only be got through the pains of limitation,’ the answer sang within him, as he lay there upon the lawn beneath the cedars, absorbing the spring beauty. ‘Everything is doing the same thing everywhere—from Smoke, Mrs. Tompkyns and Madmerzelle, right up to you, me, Daddy, and the waifs! They all have a bit of Reality in them working upwards to God. Even stones and plants and trees are learning experiences they could learn only in those particular forms—’ ‘I know it! Of course, I know it!’ Paul interrupted, with a rush of joy in his heart he could not restrain; ‘but go on and tell me more, for I love to hear your little voice say it all.’ ‘It’s only, perhaps, that the stones are learning patience and endurance; the flowers sweetness; the trees strength and comfort; and the rivers joy. Later they change about, so that in the end each ‘Bit of Reality’ has gathered all possible experiences in nature before it passes on into men and women. ‘Think, Uncle Paul, of the joy of a stone, who after centuries of patience and endurance, cramped and pressed down, knows suddenly the freedom of wind and sea! Of the restlessness of flame that, after ages of leaping unsatisfied to the sky, learns the repose of a tree, moved only by the outside forces of wind and rain! And think of the delight of all these when they pass still further upwards and reach the stage of consciousness in animals and men—and in time enter the region of development where I—where you and I, and all we knew and loved, continue together, ever climbing, fighting, learning——’