They were alone in the garden as they were in the gallery, but lovers are averse to open spaces, and Owen felt that their appearance coincided too closely with that of lovers in many popular engravings.  He hoped he was not observed, and regretted he had often spoken of the picture gallery to his friends.  An unlucky chance might bring one of them down.

It was in this garden, amid the scent and colour of May, that the most beautiful part of their love story was woven.  It was in this garden that they talked about love and happiness, and the mystery of the attraction of one person to another, and whilst listening to him, a poignant memory of the afternoon when he had first kissed her often crossed her mind.  Little faintnesses took her in the eyes and heart.  Their voices broke, and it seemed that they could not continue to talk any longer of life and art.  It was in this garden that they forgot each other.  Their thoughts wandered far away, and then, when one called the other’s attention, he or she relinquished scenes and sensations and came back appearing suddenly like someone out of a mist.  Each asked the other what he or she had been dreaming.  Once he told her his dream.  It was of a villa in the middle of a large garden surrounded by chestnut trees and planted with rhododendrons.  In this villa there dwelt a great singer whose name was a glory in the world, and to this villa there came very often a tall, thin, ugly man, and, seeing the beautiful singer walking with him, the folk wondered how she could love him.

It was a sort of delicious death, a swooning ecstasy, an absorption of her individuality in his.  Just as the spring gradually displaced the winter by a new branch of blossom, and in that corner of the garden by the winsome mauve of a lilac bush, without her knowing it his ideas caught root in her.  New thoughts and perceptions were in growth within her, and every day she discovered the new where she had been accustomed to meet the familiar idea.  She seemed to be slipping out of herself as out of a soft, white garment, unconsciously, without any effort on her part.

Very often they discussed whether sacrifice of self is not the first of the sins against life.  “That is the sin,” he said, “that cries loudest to Nature for vengeance.  To discover our best gift from Nature, and to cultivate that gift, is the first law of life.”  If she could not accept this theory of life as valid and justifiable, she had at least begun to consider it.  Another of Owen’s ideas that interested her was his theory of beauty.  He said that he could not accept the ordinary statement that a woman was beautiful and stupid.  Beauty and stupidity could not exist in the same face, stupidity being the ugliest thing on earth; and he contended that two-thirds of human beauty were the illumination of matter by the intelligence, and but one-third proportion and delicacy of line.  After some hesitation, he admitted that at first he had been disappointed in her, but now everything about her was an enchantment, and when she was not present, he lived in memories of her.  He spoke without emphasis, almost as if he were speaking to himself, and she could not answer for delight.