and yet finds life worth while."

"Is it, dear?" said Sue.

"Yes, it is. You know Socrates was glad when he had passed the age of
love. Now I understand why that was. I never did before."

Sue Pickett said nothing, only stroked the dark head upon her breast.
But a rather cryptic smile stirred her lips. She was thinking that from
all she had read and heard, two beings could hardly differ more
essentially than Sophy and the Sage of Athens.

XLVI

Sophy spent the rest of that summer and the following winter at
Sweet-Waters. She did not wish to go among people so soon after her
divorce, besides she felt the need of self-adjustment to her new
relations with life.

That sense of being unreal in a world of unreality, which she had
mentioned to Susan Pickett on the day of the divorce, lasted for some
time. Then, in the early autumn--in her favourite month of
October--began a recrudescence of the imperishable passion for life as
opposed to mere existence, that lent her always the elemental charm of
fire. Many natures shine in the great dim of circumstance, but with
light differently derived. Some are, as one might put it,
phosphorescent. In others one divines the pinch of star-dust in the
clay--still luminous, still perfervid, as when the cosmic nebula first
spun the white hot core of things. It was this mystic fire that glowed
again in Sophy, burning clearer for the ash beneath it, even as the
humbler, yet still sacred fire of hearths, burns clearer in like case.
It was as if in resigning her desire for one supremely personal love,
Love itself had drawn nearer. Motherhood meant for her now, not only her
feeling for her little son, but an aching towards all unmothered things.
It was not _welt-schmerz_, this feeling--_welt passion_ rather.... She
was like one who has lived for years in a lovely, doorless, painted
house, lit by perfumed candles--then one day steps through a sudden
break in its wall to face the tremendous sea. Yes--life lay like that
before her--perilous but to be drowned in rather than left
unessayed--unsailed. The cosmic romance was upon her. She no longer
belittled romance to a love-tale--rather it was the adventure of a
creative god--Zeus as Poet. And this new, impassioned desire to live
fully, largely, universally, so confused her in the beginning, that she
hardly knew where first to turn--so vast were her ignorances--so
clamorous the wave-like voices that called from every side.

She felt a g