t even the
butterfly has its uses, and maybe I was meant to play a little part in
your big life. I like to think it was so. Sometimes a bright day gets a
little more interest from the drone of the locust or the glow of a
butterfly's wings. I'm not sure that the locust's droning and the
bright flutter of the butterfly's wings are not the way Nature has of
fastening the soul to the meaning of it all. I wonder if you ever heard
the lines--foolish they read, but they are not:

"'All summer long there was one little butterfly,
Flying ahead of me,
Wings red and yellow, a pretty little fellow,
Flying ahead of me.
One little butterfly, one little butterfly,
What can his message be?--
All summer long, there was one little butterfly
Flying ahead of me.'

"It may be so that the poet meant the butterfly to mean the joy of
things, the hope of things, the love of things flying ahead to draw us
on and on into the sunlight and up the steeps, and over the higher
hills.

"Ian, I would like to be such a butterfly in your eyes at this moment;
perhaps the insignificant means of making you see the near thing to do,
and by doing it get a step on towards the Far Thing. You used always to
think of the Far Thing. Ah, what ambition you had when I first knew you
on the Zambesi, when the old red umbrella, but for you, would have
carried me over into the mist and the thunder! Well, you have lost that
ambition. I know why you came out here. No one ever told me. The thing
behind the words in your letter tells me plainer than words. The last
time I saw you in London--do you remember when it was? It was the day
that Rudyard Byng drove Krool into Park Lane with the sjambok. Well,
that last time, when I met you in the hall as we were both leaving a
house of trouble, I felt the truth. Do you remember the day I went to
see you when Mr. Mappin came? I felt the truth then more. I often
wondered how I could ever help you in the old days. That was an
ambition of mine. But I had no brains--no brains like Jasmine's and
many another woman; and I was never able to do anything. But now I feel
as I never felt anything before in my life. I feel that my time and my
chance have come. I feel like a prophetess, like Miriam,--or was it
Deborah?--and that I must wind the horn of warning as you walk on the
edge of the precipice.

"Ian, it's only little souls who do the work that should be left to
Allah, and I don't believe that you can take the reins