he cushions
and to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard to
pronounce (she must always invert, from sheer anxiety, the English
_th'_s and _s'_s); I had to say them first, and once more, and yet
again. And we laughed, and I kissed her beloved patient face and her
dear young white hair. I don't think it ever occurred to tell her my
intention of putting her name on this volume--it went without saying.
And besides, had not everything I could do or be of good belonged to her
during the eighteen months we had been friends?

There was another reason, however, why this book more particularly
should have been hers; and having been hers, dear Madame Blanc, yours.
Do you remember telling me how, years ago, and in a terrible moment of
your experience, she had surprised you, herself still so young, by a
remark which had sunk deep into your mind and had very greatly helped
you? "We must," you told me she had said, "be prepared to begin life
many times afresh." Now that is the thought, though never clearly
expressed, which runs through these essays. And the essential goodness
and fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and over
again, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the love
of her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. So
that my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepest
consolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with this
creature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute gift
of loving-kindness or gratitude, to all people and all things that
deserved it.

That life is worthy to be lived well, with fortitude, tenderness, and a
certain reserved pride and humility, was indeed the essential, unspoken
tenet of Gabrielle Delzant's religion, into which there entered, not
merely the teachings of Stoics and Jansenists, but the traditional
gaiety and gallant bearing of the little southern French nobles from
whom she was descended. Her Huguenot blood, of which, with the dear
self-contradictoriness of all true saints, she was inordinately proud;
her Catholic doctrine, which by natural affinity was that of Port Royal
and Pascal; this double strain of asceticism of both her faiths (for,
like all deep believers, she had more than one) merely gave a solemn
base, a zest, to her fine intuition of nature and joy. The refusal to
possess (even her best-beloved books never bore her own name, and her
beautiful bevelled ward