Because that seemed the secret of all the happiness of life—­the meeting, with a sense of intimate security, something warm and breathing, that had need of me as I of it, that could smile and clasp, foster and pity, admire and adore, and in the embrace of which one could feel one’s hope and joy grow and stir by contact and trust.  That was what one found in the hearts about one’s path; and the wonder was, did some similar chance of embracing, clasping, trusting, and loving that vaster Power await one in the dim spaces beyond the fields and homes of earth?

I guessed that it was so, but saw, as in a faint vision, that many harsh events, sorry mischances, blows and wounds and miseries, hated and dreaded and endured, lay between me and that larger Heart.  But I perceived at last, with terror and mistrust, that the adventure did indeed lie there; that I should often be disdained and repulsed, untended and unheeded, bitterly disillusioned, shaken out of ease and complacency, but assuredly folded to that greater Heart at last.

5

And then there followed a different phase.  Up to the very end of the university period, the same uneasiness continued; then quite suddenly the door opened, one slipped into the world, one found one’s place.  There were instantaneously real things to be done, real money to earn, men and women to live with and work with, to conciliate or to resist.  A mist rolled away from my eyes.  What a fantastic life it had been hitherto, how sheltered, how remote from actuality!  I seemed to have been building up a rococo stucco habitation out of whims and fancies, adding a room here and a row of pinnacles there, all utterly bizarre and grotesque.  Vague dreams of poetry and art, nothing penetrated or grasped, a phrase here, a fancy there; one’s ideal of culture seemed like Ophelia in Hamlet, a distracted nymph stuck all over with flowers and anxious to explain the sentimental value of each; the friendships themselves—­ they had nothing stable about them either; they were not based upon any common aim, any real mutual concern; they were nothing more than the enshrining of a fugitive charm, the tracking of some bright-eyed fawn or wild-haired dryad to its secret haunt, only to find the bird flown and the nest warm.  But now there was little time for fancies; there was a real burden to carry, a genuine task to perform; day after day slipped past, like the furrows in a field seen from some speeding car; the contented mind, pleasantly wearied at the end of the busy day, heaved a light-hearted sigh of relief, and turned to some recreation with zest and delight.  It was not that the quest had been successful; it seemed rather that there was no quest at all, and that it was the joy of daily work that had been the missing factor . . . the weeks melted into months, the months became years.