In the old days love was a cruel proprietary thing.  But now Anna could let Nettie live in the world of my mind, as freely as a rose will suffer the presence of white lilies.  If I could hear notes that were not in her compass, she was glad, because she loved me, that I should listen to other music than hers.  And she, too, could see the beauty of Nettie.  Life is so rich and generous now, giving friendship, and a thousand tender interests and helps and comforts, that no one stints another of the full realization of all possibilities of beauty.  For me from the beginning Nettie was the figure of beauty, the shape and color of the divine principle that lights the world.  For every one there are certain types, certain faces and forms, gestures, voices and intonations that have that inexplicable unanalyzable quality.  These come through the crowd of kindly friendly fellow-men and women—­one’s own.  These touch one mysteriously, stir deeps that must otherwise slumber, pierce and interpret the world.  To refuse this interpretation is to refuse the sun, to darken and deaden all life. . . .  I loved Nettie, I loved all who were like her, in the measure that they were like her, in voice, or eyes, or form, or smile.  And between my wife and me there was no bitterness that the great goddess, the life-giver, Aphrodite, Queen of the living Seas, came to my imagination so.  It qualified our mutual love not at all, since now in our changed world love is unstinted; it is a golden net about our globe that nets all humanity together.

I thought of Nettie much, and always movingly beautiful things restored me to her, all fine music, all pure deep color, all tender and solemn things.  The stars were hers, and the mystery of moonlight; the sun she wore in her hair, powdered finely, beaten into gleams and threads of sunlight in the wisps and strands of her hair. . . .  Then suddenly one day a letter came to me from her, in her unaltered clear handwriting, but in a new language of expression, telling me many things.  She had learnt of my mother’s death, and the thought of me had grown so strong as to pierce the silence I had imposed on her.  We wrote to one another—­like common friends with a certain restraint between us at first, and with a great longing to see her once more arising in my heart.  For a time I left that hunger unexpressed, and then I was moved to tell it to her.  And so on New Year’s Day in the Year Four, she came to Lowchester and me.  How I remember that coming, across the gulf of fifty years!  I went out across the park to meet her, so that we should meet alone.  The windless morning was clear and cold, the ground new carpeted with snow, and all the trees motionless lace and glitter of frosty crystals.  The rising sun had touched the white with a spirit of gold, and my heart beat and sang within me.  I remember now the snowy shoulder of the down, sunlit against the bright blue sky.  And presently I saw the woman I loved coming through the white still trees. . . .