n which I
stood, for this one person who could fulfil all my desires. So long
as my mother had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, given
me a food these emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptiness
of spirit, but now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me.
There had been many at the season of the Change who had thought that
this great enlargement of mankind would abolish personal love; but
indeed it had only made it finer, fuller, more vitally necessary.
They had thought that, seeing men now were all full of the joyful
passion to make and do, and glad and loving and of willing service
to all their fellows, there would be no need of the one intimate
trusting communion that had been the finest thing of the former
life. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of advantage and
the struggle for existence, they were right. But so far as it was
a matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it was
altogether wrong.

We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it
of its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary
and competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our minds
stark, shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricating
ways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for
every one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the
key of one's self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere
existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident
to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined
lovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them the
fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed
without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater without a play.
. . . And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear as white
flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies in
me. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew not whither
she had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out
of my life for ever!

So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called upon
Nettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, while
the glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thick
across the distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows and
the fluctuating glares, danced over the face of the world.

No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from
habitual and mechanical concupiscence and me