‘He puts the idea of an irony down to the guilt of impatience, Tony.’

’Could there be a keener irony than that?  A friend of Dada’s waited patiently for a small fortune, and when it arrived, he was a worn-out man, just assisted to go decently to his grave.’

‘But he may have gained in spirit by his patient waiting.’

’Oh! true.  We are warmer if we travel on foot sunward, but it is a discovery that we are colder if we take to ballooning upward.  The material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it.  All life is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit.  I will brood on your saying.’

’It is your own saying, silly Tony, as the only things worth saying always, are!’ exclaimed Emma, as she smiled happily to see her friend’s mind reviving, though it was faintly and in the dark.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Of nature with one of her cultivated daughters and A short excursion in anti-climax

A mind that after a long season of oblivion in pain returns to wakefulness without a keen edge for the world, is much in danger of souring permanently.  Diana’s love of nature saved her from the dire mischance during a two months’ residence at Copsley, by stupefying her senses to a state like the barely conscious breathing on the verge of sleep.  February blew South-west for the pairing of the birds.  A broad warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity of form in magnitude over peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, or piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset.  Or sometimes those daughters of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple, threatening the shower they retained and teaching gloom to rouse a songful nest in the bosom of the viewer.  Sometimes they were April, variable to soar with rain-skirts and sink with sunshafts.  Or they drenched wood and field for a day and opened on the high South-western star.  Daughters of the wind, but shifty daughters of this wind of the dropping sun, they have to be watched to be loved in their transformations.

Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.  If Arthur said:  ’Such a day would be considered melancholy by London people,’ she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed to her things of the deepest.  The simplest were her food.  Thus does Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature confidingly animal for its new growth.  She imagined herself to have lost the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.  Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her daily desires.  She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes,