e
the first when she was so much younger than I, doesn't it?"

"Rough luck on you, or on her, are you meaning at the moment?"

"At the moment I was meaning on her. She was so in love with life. But I
suppose really on me. I might, humanly speaking, have been fairly sure
that I should have had her as a companion all the last years."

"Do you find it very lonely since Ruth married her tame clergyman and
Lissa went away to become a full-blown painter?"

"Doesn't it always have to be lonely? Isn't it always really? The only
thing is that when we are young we have distractions which prevent us
seeing it. We can cheat ourselves with physical contact that makes us
think it possible to fuse with any one other human being. But it isn't.
When we are our age--well, we know it's always isolated, but that it
doesn't matter."

"What does matter? Those to come?"

"Yes, those to come--always them first; yet not that alone, or there
would be no more value in them than in ourselves if it were always to be
a vicious circle like that. Each individual soul is equally important,
the old as much as the young, in the eternal scheme. It is only in the
economy of this world that youth is more important than age."

"I think I can fairly lay claim to being a broadminded ''vert'" said
Judith, "but of course, you know, I can't help feeling I've got
something in the way of what makes things worth while that you haven't?"

"Yes, I know you do. I see you're bound to have. But of course, owing to
what the Parson inculcated into me, I think I've got it too, but I quite
see I can't expect you to think so."

"It's seeing the light that matters most, I think," said Judy. "We
believe the same though I _know_ I've got it, and you only _think_ you
have! But it's the thinking that is all important. The mystery to me is
how anyone can be satisfied with the phenomena of this world alone as
an answer to the riddle."

"It's not so much of a mystery to me. The world is so very beautiful
that it can stand instead of human love, so why not, to some people,
instead of Divine love also? The beauty of it is what I have chiefly
lived by. It could for very long thrill me to the exclusion of
everything else."

"And now?" asked Judith.

"Now? Now I am old that has been young, and still I cannot answer you
that. I believe these airmen tell you of air pockets they come to, holes
in the atmosphere, where their machines drop, drop.... I think I am in
an air pocket