Indeed, the June morning was beautiful, and the foxgloves ringing the white dial post above the fresh green of our lawn had an indescribable air of delicate stateliness in the sun. And they were murmurous with bees. Again and again that morning I looked up from my work and saw them there, in the focussed sunlight, saw my wife hovering over them, saw beyond them, through the rose arches, Mike and Joe at work on the farm, saw still farther away the procession of my pines, and then the far hills and the blue sky. Again, at quiet evening, when a white-throated sparrow and an oriole were competing in song, we watched the foxgloves turn to white ghosts glimmering in the dusk, we heard the bird songs die away, the shrill of night insects arise, and then the tinkle of our brook came into consciousness, as it ran ever riverward in the night. "The spring melts into summer," said Stella, "as gently as the little brook runs toward the sea. I wish it would linger, though. Oh, John, couldn't we build a dam and hold back the spring? A little pool of spring forever in our garden?" "We shall have to make that pool within our hearts," said I. Chapter XXIV SOME RURAL PROBLEMS There are many mysteries of marriage, quite unanticipated by the bachelor before he changes his state. Not the least of them is the new range of social relations and impulses which follow a happy union. I do not mean social relations with a capital S. About such I know little and care less. Presumably marriage may bring them, also, into the life of a man who chooses the wrong wife. In fact, Stella and I have seen more than one case of it in Bentford, where we dwell near enough to the fringes of Society to observe the parasitic aspirations of several ladies with more fortune than "position." Mrs. Eckstrom, we have discovered since her call, is such a one. We, of course, were of no use to her, and she had not troubled us since, though two gold fish did arrive that night, as I have told. We are grateful for Antony and Cleopatra. No, what I mean by social relations and impulses are the opportunities for service and the impulses to jump in and help others, which matrimony discloses and breeds. Who can say why this is so? Who can say why the bachelor is generally negatively--if not actively--selfish, while the same man when he has achieved a good wife, opened a house of his own, begun to employ labour directly instead of through the medium of a club or bachelor apartment hotel, is suddenly aware of wrong conditions in the world about him and a new desire to help set them right? It cannot entirely be due to the woman, for very often her maiden life has been as barren of social service as his own. It is inherent in the state of matrimony, and to me it seems one of the glories of that state. Those couples who have not felt it, I think, have been but sterilely mated, though they have reproduced their kind never so many times.