Why, of course, in our long-drawn-out Christian day, man is given and woman is recipient.  Man is the gift, woman the receiver.  This is the sacrament we live by; the holy Communion we live for.  That man gives himself to woman in an utter and sacred abandon, all, all, all himself given, and taken.  Woman, eternal woman, she is the communicant.  She receives the sacramental body and spirit of the man.  And when she’s got it, according to her passionate and all-too-sacred desire, completely, when she possesses her man at last finally and ultimately, without blemish or reservation in the perfection of the sacrament:  then, also, poor woman, the blood and the body of which she has partaken become insipid or nauseous to her, she is driven mad by the endless meal of the marriage sacrament, poisoned by the sacred communion which was her goal and her soul’s ambition.

We have pushed a process into a goal.  The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof.  Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul:  love also incomprehensible, but still only a process.  The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish.  The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman.  Only that.  Which isn’t exciting enough for us sensationalists.  We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of slime and merge.

Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished.  But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness.  Without this, love is a disease.

So Aaron, crossing a certain border-line and finding himself alone completely, accepted his loneliness or singleness as a fulfilment, a state of fulfilment.  The long fight with Lottie had driven him at last to himself, so that he was quiet as a thing which has its root deep in life, and has lost its anxiety.  As for considering the lily, it is not a matter of consideration.  The lily toils and spins hard enough, in her own way.  But without that strain and that anxiety with which we try to weave ourselves a life.  The lily is life-rooted, life-central.  She cannot worry.  She is life itself, a little, delicate fountain playing creatively, for as long or as short a time as may be, and unable to be anxious.  She may be sad or sorry, if the north wind blows.  But even then, anxious she cannot be.  Whether her fountain play or cease to play, from out the cold, damp earth, she cannot be anxious.  She may only be glad or sorry, and continue her way.  She is perfectly herself, whatever befall! even if frosts cut her off.  Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfilment.