ut too.

"Oh! Look, Frank! A grave!"

By the side of the road, where the track from the top of the common
crossed it at right angles and ran through a gate past the narrow wood,
was a thin mound of turf, six feet by one, with a moorstone to the west,
and on it someone had thrown a blackthorn spray and a handful of
bluebells. Ashurst looked, and the poet in him moved. At cross-roads--a
suicide's grave! Poor mortals with their superstitions! Whoever lay
there, though, had the best of it, no clammy sepulchre among other
hideous graves carved with futilities--just a rough stone, the wide sky,
and wayside blessings! And, without comment, for he had learned not to
be a philosopher in the bosom of his family, he strode away up on to the
common, dropped the luncheon basket under a wall, spread a rug for his
wife to sit on--she would turn up from her sketching when she was
hungry--and took from his pocket Murray's translation of the
"Hippolytus." He had soon finished reading of "The Cyprian" and her
revenge, and looked at the sky instead. And watching the white clouds so
bright against the intense blue, Ashurst, on his silver-wedding day,
longed for--he knew not what. Maladjusted to life--man's organism!
One's mode of life might be high and scrupulous, but there was always an,
undercurrent of greediness, a hankering, and sense of waste. Did women
have it too? Who could tell? And yet, men who gave vent to their
appetites for novelty, their riotous longings for new adventures, new
risks, new pleasures, these suffered, no doubt, from the reverse side of
starvation, from surfeit. No getting out of it--a maladjusted animal,
civilised man! There could be no garden of his choosing, of "the
Apple-tree, the singing, and the gold," in the words of that lovely Greek
chorus, no achievable elysium in life, or lasting haven of happiness for
any man with a sense of beauty--nothing which could compare with the
captured loveliness in a work of art, set down for ever, so that to look
on it or read was always to have the same precious sense of exaltation
and restful inebriety. Life no doubt had moments with that quality of
beauty, of unbidden flying rapture, but the trouble was, they lasted no
longer than the span of a cloud's flight over the sun; impossible to keep
them with you, as Art caught beauty and held it fast. They were fleeting
as one of the glimmering or golden visions one had of the soul in nature,
glimpses of its rem