“But,” said Lettie, “he is a real realist, he makes common things beautiful, he sees the mystery and magnificence that envelops us even when we work menially. I _do_ know and I _can_ speak. If I hoed in the fields beside you——” This was a very new idea for him, almost a shock to his imagination, and she talked unheeded. The picture under discussion was a water-colour—“Hoeing” by Clausen. “You’d be just that colour in the sunset,” she said, thus bringing him back to the subject, “and if you looked at the ground you’d find there was a sense of warm gold fire in it, and once you’d perceived the colour, it would strengthen till you’d see nothing else. You are blind; you are only half-born; you are gross with good living and heavy sleeping. You are a piano which will only play a dozen common notes. Sunset is nothing to you—it merely happens anywhere. Oh, but you make me feel as if I’d like to make you suffer. If you’d ever been sick; if you’d ever been born into a home where there was something oppressed you, and you couldn’t understand; if ever you’d believed, or even doubted, you might have been a man by now. You never grow up, like bulbs which spend all summer getting fat and fleshy, but never wakening the germ of a flower. As for me, the flower is born in me, but it wants bringing forth. Things don’t flower if they’re overfed. You have to suffer before you blossom in this life. When death is just touching a plant, it forces it into a passion of flowering. You wonder how I have touched death. You don’t know. There’s always a sense of death in this home. I believe my mother hated my father before I was born. That was death in her veins for me before I was born. It makes a difference——” As he sat listening, his eyes grew wide and his lips were parted, like a child who feels the tale but does not understand the words. She, looking away from herself at last, saw him, began to laugh gently, and patted his hand saying: “Oh! my dear heart, are you bewildered? How amiable of you to listen to me—there isn’t any meaning in it all—there isn’t really!” “But,” said he, “why do you say it?” “Oh, the question!” she laughed. “Let us go back to our muttons, we’re gazing at each other like two dazed images.” They turned on, chatting casually, till George suddenly exclaimed, “There!” It was Maurice Griffinhagen’s “Idyll.” “What of it?” she asked, gradually flushing. She remembered her own enthusiasm over the picture. “Wouldn’t it be fine?” he exclaimed, looking at her with glowing eyes, his teeth showing white in a smile that was not amusement. “What?” she asked, dropping her head in confusion. “That—a girl like that—half afraid—and passion!” He lit up curiously. “She may well be half afraid, when the barbarian comes out in his glory, skins and all.” “But don’t you like it?” he asked.