or. That I and Anna should love, and after our love-journey
together, go about our separate lives and dine at the public tables,
until the advent of her motherhood, would have seemed a terrible
strain upon our unmitigable loyalty. And that I should have it
in me to go on loving Nettie--who loved in different manner both
Verrall and me--would have outraged the very quintessence of the
old convention.

In the old days love was a cruel proprietary thing. But now Anna
could let Nettie live in the world of my mind, as freely as a rose
will suffer the presence of white lilies. If I could hear notes that
were not in her compass, she was glad, because she loved me, that
I should listen to other music than hers. And she, too, could see
the beauty of Nettie. Life is so rich and generous now, giving
friendship, and a thousand tender interests and helps and comforts, that
no one stints another of the full realization of all possibilities
of beauty. For me from the beginning Nettie was the figure of beauty,
the shape and color of the divine principle that lights the world.
For every one there are certain types, certain faces and forms,
gestures, voices and intonations that have that inexplicable
unanalyzable quality. These come through the crowd of kindly friendly
fellow-men and women--one's own. These touch one mysteriously, stir
deeps that must otherwise slumber, pierce and interpret the world.
To refuse this interpretation is to refuse the sun, to darken and
deaden all life. . . . I loved Nettie, I loved all who were like
her, in the measure that they were like her, in voice, or eyes, or
form, or smile. And between my wife and me there was no bitterness
that the great goddess, the life-giver, Aphrodite, Queen of the
living Seas, came to my imagination so. It qualified our mutual
love not at all, since now in our changed world love is unstinted;
it is a golden net about our globe that nets all humanity together.

I thought of Nettie much, and always movingly beautiful things
restored me to her, all fine music, all pure deep color, all
tender and solemn things. The stars were hers, and the mystery of
moonlight; the sun she wore in her hair, powdered finely, beaten
into gleams and threads of sunlight in the wisps and strands of her
hair. . . . Then suddenly one day a letter came to me from her, in
her unaltered clear handwriting, but in a new language of expression,
telling me many things. She had learnt of my mother's death, and