which (knowing its poor brief reign) has played us and our friend that
mean trick. When this happens we must be merciless, like the fairy-story
prince when the wicked creatures in the wood spoke to him in the voice
of his mother; piety towards the original arms us with ruthlessness
towards the portrait. It was for this same reason that, as I have said,
I unpinned from my screen those two facsimiles of drawings, feeling
rather a brute while I was doing so.

SERE AND YELLOW

INTERLUDE

"Alors que je me croyais aux derniers jours de l'automne, dans un jardin
depouille." The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the most
charming among eighteenth-century letter-writers; but one of whom, for
all the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing: a delicate,
austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking into
the dimness. She wrote those words when already an old woman, and long
after death had taken her father and her daughter and most of her
nearest and dearest, to the young Abbe de Carlades, who proved himself
(one hopes) not utterly unworthy of that "unexpected late flowering of
the soul." The phrase is eighteenth century, and it may be the feeling
itself is of as bygone a fashion. Or does this seem the case because
such delicate souls can become known to us only when they and their
loves and friendships have ceased to be more than a handful of faded
paper, fingered very piously, for heaven's sake?

However this may be, that phrase of Madame de Hauterive's contains a
truth which is undying, and which, though unobtrusive, can be observed
by those who have a discreet eye for the soul's affairs. Nay, one might
say that the knowledge of how many times life can begin afresh, the
knowledge of the new modes of happiness which may succeed each other,
even when the leaves float down yellow in the still air, and the dews on
the renovated grass are white like frost, is one of the blessed secrets
into which the passing seasons initiate those who have honourably
cultivated the garden of life, and life's wide common acres.

Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among
the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those
who never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannot
conceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what it
calls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projected
forward. Hence youth