He was certainly _like_ a garden, as he stood at his house-door, looking out. When most people open their doors and stare, the things outside come awake, but they took no notice of Kirkby. The gardens, as it were, did not even look up. They were no more disturbed by his appearance than by one of their own shadows lying under the bushes, or by the long, ghostly lines of the green and crystal hoar-frost. He was old and gentle, like an English garden, but he was hale, too, and not by any means run to seed. His clothes, good clothes, now pleasantly shabby, had a mellow tone which blended softly with their setting. His fresh complexion and faded but clear eyes had the pale tints of some of his own blossoms. The very droop of his shoulders was less like the slow curve which comes with age than the gentle stoop of a flower. Especially he loved the quietness because it was at this hour that he had a vision of the gardens as he planned them for the year. This was his creative time, these few moments before the men came and broke and scattered his thoughts. It was then that he saw the long succession of colours and kinds with which the gardens would sum up their rich total before the winter came again. He would lose some of it later, of course, owing to other people’s follies and fancies, and the stolid frustration of concrete facts. But some of it would persist, even through worries and contradictions and the hard blows of the northern weather; so that, by the time the resting-months for the gardens came round once more, he would always in some measure have fulfilled his dream. He was not always able to snatch these god-like moments in which he controlled the future. Often enough, Mattie was downstairs first, and he could not call up his pictures while she was working and talking. Husbands and wives were so near to each other that they got in each other’s way over things like those,--things that had to have you all to themselves, or they would not come. But he always took his moments when he could get them, because he needed them. His days were poorer without them and the assurance they brought him, as days are poorer without a prayer. And just now was the time when the vision was strongest and clearest, when there was promise of new life all around, and still it was only promise. Like all artists, he saw his creation best when there was still nothing but a blank page in front of him. It had then a clarity, a sweep, a combined passion and restraint which it never achieved again after he had once begun to work upon it. It altered, no matter how he tried to preserve it. Alien ideas crept in, upsetting the balance of his scheme. Beautiful ideas they were, too, sometimes, but they were alien, nevertheless. Often he had tried to convince himself that the altered plan was all for the best; but as soon as the springtime both of the gardens and of his inspiration came round again, he knew that the thing which he saw then was the finer and purer.