No one heart can be happy, that all
hearts may not have a share of it. Rosamond and Kenneth, Dakie and
Ruth, cannot live out obviously any sweetness of living, cannot
sing any notes of the endless, beautiful score, that Desire
Ledwith, and Luclarion Grapp, and Rachel Froke, and Hapsie
Craydocke, and old Miss Arabel Waite, do not just as truly get the
blessed grace and understanding of; do not catch and feel the
perfect and abounding harmony of. Since why? No lip can sound more
than its own few syllables of music; no life show more than its
own few accidents and incidents and groupings; the vast melody,
the rich, eternal satisfying, are behind; and the signs are for us
all!

You may not think this, or see it so, in your first tussle and
set-to with the disappointing and eluding things that seem the real
and only,--missing which you miss all. This chapter may be less to
you--less _for_ you, perhaps--than for your elders; the story may
have ended, as to that you care for, some pages back; but for all
that, this is certain; and Desire Ledwith has begun to find it, for
she is one of those true, grand spirits to whom personal loss or
frustration are most painful as they seem to betoken something
wrong or failed in the general scheme and justice. This terrible
"why should it be?" once answered,--once able to say to themselves
quietly, "It is all right; the beauty and the joy are there; the
song is sung, though we are of the listeners; the miracle-play is
played, though but a few take literal part, and many of us look on,
with the play, like the song, moving through our souls only, or our
souls moving in the vital sphere of it, where the stage is wide
enough for all;"--once come to this, they have entered already into
that which is behind, and nothing of all that goes forth thence into
the earth to make its sunshine can be shut off from them forever.

Desire is learning to be glad, thinking of Kenneth and Rosamond,
that this fair marriage should have been. It is so just and exactly
best; Rosamond's sweet graciousness is so precisely what Kenneth's
sterner way needed to have shine upon it; her finding and making of
all manner of pleasantness will be so good against his sharp
discernment of the wrong; they will so beautifully temper and
sustain each other!

Desire is so generous, so glad of the truth, that she can stand
aside, and let this better thing be, and say to herself that it _is_
better.

Is not this that she is g