of things, has decided that "faith is nonsense," does
not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the
form that nonsense is faith.

_G. K. Chesterton._

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the
true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of
life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the
colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once
fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of
betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not the
manifestation thereof. It is one of the things the value of which is
secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The
true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the
covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and
the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood. So
bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life is
outdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty is that it is
white, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth;
red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less lucid
than the colour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in all fine
colour; but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive. Under
Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory; but under the
misty blue of the English zenith, and the warm grey of the London
horizon, it is as delicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out to
their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges of the end of June.

For months together London does not see the colour of life in any
mass. The human face does not give much of it, what with features, and
beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and _chapeau melon_ of man, and
of the veils of woman. Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a
thousand injuries and accidents. The popular face of the Londoner has
soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown.
We miss little beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in
great numbers out-of-doors. You get it in some quantity when all the
heads of a great indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but
it is only in the open air, needless to say, that the colour of life
is in perfection, in the open air, "clothed with the sun," whether the
sunshine be golden and direct, or dazzlingly diffused in grey.

The little