Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does not everything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be covered soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained. No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly procession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year, inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to grow a green wreath about my head by next spring! Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where there is so much space between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow for him to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent but acquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will be happier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watches the miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally, however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some one should be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow my alms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaic indifference with which he endures these caresses, you _could_ not be jealous! XXXIX PHILIP TO JESSICA I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil was to care for the world's early-blooming flowers. But what was our first great parent to me? There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies show-- and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia's cheek that the poet described as "rose leaves floating in the purest milk"? And was it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could "die of a rose in aromatic pain"? I could write an anthology on Jessica Blushing; indeed I could hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as in going through the poets and bringing together all that they have said in prophecy of your many divine properties. Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself--think of that!--me, for these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions! I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of the first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaic summons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn under the covers and think of the day's work.