? Why, when I
had given up all thought of love, and won a tranquil, clear content of
spirit, did you send love to trample my secret garden like a dark angel
in a whirlwind?"

She came to the conclusion that life means something vaster and more
splendid than a restored Eden, where one man and one woman walk together
guarded in their blissful isolation by the flaming sword of selfishness.
"Come forth of that!" thunders the Voice that is not one love but All
Love. And so Life hales us by the hair, out of our little palaces of
dreams. And we are driven naked into the desert of reality. And when we
have read aright what is written in the desert sands--behold! the desert
blossoms like the rose.

But this writing was not yet clear to Sophy. She toiled through the hot,
clogging sands, and what was traced upon them seemed to her only the
wanton hieroglyphics of the wind ... the wild wind that blew men and
women hither and thither like rootless stalks. Yet she believed in this
vaster and more splendid meaning that Life kept hidden, under all its
dark pranks and sardonic jesting. She imagined Life, in those days, as a
huge, Afrit clown, under whose motley is secreted the Seal of Solomon.
If one could but survive the horrid rough-and-tumble of his sinister
game, one would be able, in the end, to snatch away the magic seal at
whose touch all mysteries open.

That spring brought a new difficulty. Lady Wychcote's letters on the
subject of seeing her grandson had become very pressing of late. In
February she had been quite ill. Now in her convalescence she wrote more
urgently than ever, saying that she felt she had a right to ask that her
only grandchild should not be kept away from her any longer. She asked
(her request was almost in the form of a demand) that Sophy would bring
Cecil's son to England some time during that spring or summer. Sophy
felt the justice of this request. She felt that she owed its fulfilment
to Cecil's mother--that she really had no right to keep Bobby apart from
her indefinitely.

And yet, when she thought of a visit to England and all that it
involved, she winced from it in her most secret fibres.

XXI

The more Sophy thought of this visit to England, the more she shrank
from it and the more obligatory she felt it to be. She dreaded it for
many reasons. The meeting with Lady Wychcote would be painful in the
extreme. She could imagine those hard eyes as though they were already
fastened on her