een very good, very generous to you, Viva. Be
content with her gifts. What you lack is only a thing of man's
invention--a quibble, a bauble, a Pharisee's phylactery. Look at the
river-lilies that drift yonder--how white they are, how their leaves
enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with
them! Well, are they not better off than the poor rare flowers that live
painfully in hothouse air, and are labelled, and matted, and given long
names by men's petty precise laws? You are like the river-lilies. O
child, do not pine for the glass house that would ennoble you, only to
force you and kill you?

* * *

Wrong to be proud, you ask? No. But then the pride must be of a right
fashion. It must be the pride which says, "Let me not envy, for that
were meanness. Let me not covet, for that were akin to theft. Let me not
repine, for that were weakness." It must be the pride which says, "I can
be sufficient for myself. My life makes my nobility; and I need no
accident of rank, because I have a stainless honour." It must be pride
too proud to let an aged woman work where youthful limbs can help her;
too proud to trample basely on what lies low already; too proud to be a
coward, and shrink from following conscience in the confession of known
error; too proud to despise the withered toil-worn hands of the poor and
old, and be vilely forgetful that those hands succoured you in your
utmost need of helpless infancy!

* * *

Philosophy, Viva, is the pomegranate of life, ever cool and most
fragrant, and the deeper you cut in it the richer only will the core
grow. Power is the Dead-Sea apple, golden and fair to sight while the
hand strives to reach it, dry grey ashes between dry fevered lips when
once it is grasped and eaten!

* * *

Pleasure is but labour to those who do not know also that labour in its
turn is pleasure.

* * *

Happy! As a mollusc is happy so long as the sea sweeps prey into its
jaws; what does the mollusc care how many lives have been shipwrecked so
long as the tide wafts it worms? She has killed her conscience, Viva;
there is no murder more awful. It is to slay what touch of God we have
in us!

* * *

Have I been cruel, my child? Your fever of discontent needed a sharp
cure. Life lies before you, Viva, and you alone can mould it for
yourself. Sin and anguish fill nine-tenths of the world: to