I was walking with Father Payne in the garden one day of spring.  I think I liked him better when I was alone with him than I did when we were all together.  His mind expanded more tenderly and simply—­less epigrammatically.  He spoke of this once to me, saying:  “I am at my best when alone; even one companion deflects me.  I find myself wishing to please him, pinching off roughnesses, perfuming truth, diplomatising.  This ought not to be, of course; and if one was not thorny, self-assertive, stupid, it would not be so; and every companion added makes me worse, because the strain of accommodation grows—­I become vulgar and rough and boisterous in a large circle.  I often feel:  ’How these young men must be hating this gibbering and giggling ape, which after all is not really me!’” I tried to reassure him, but he shook his head, though with a smiling air.  “Barthrop is not like that,” he said, “the wise Barthrop!  He is never suspicious or hasty—­he does not think it necessary to affirm; yet you are never in any doubt what he thinks!  He moves along like water, never anxious if he is held up or divided, creeping on as the land lies—­that is the right way.”

Presently he stopped, and looked long at some daffodil blades which were thrusting up in a sheltered place.  “Look at the gray bloom on those blades,” he said; “isn’t that perfect?  Fancy thinking of that—­each of them so obviously the same thought taking shape, yet each of them different.  Do not you see in them something calm, continuous, active—­happy, in fact—­at work; often tripped up and imprisoned, and thwarted—­but moving on?” He was silent a little, and then he said:  “This force of life—­what a fascinating mystery it is—­never dying, never ceasing, always coming back to shape itself into matter.  I wonder sometimes it is not content to exist alone; but no, it is always back again, arranging matter, manipulating it into beautiful shapes and creatures, never discouraged; even when the plant falls ill and begins to pine away, the happy life is within it—­languid perhaps, but just waiting for the release, till the cage in which it has imprisoned itself is opened, and then—­so I believe—­back again in an instant somewhere else.

“I am inclined to believe,” he went on, “that that is what we are all about; it seems to me the only explanation for the fact that we care so much about the past and the future.  If we are creatures of a day, why should we be interested?  The only reason we care about the past is because we ourselves were there in it; and we care about the future because we shall be there in it again.”

“You mean a sort of re-incarnation,” I said.