en it an
opportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It has
crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the
ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy
in a good cause, and bold out of reach. It has been the most defiant
runaway, and the meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready and
potential in every place, so that the happy country--village and field
alike--has been all grass, with mere exceptions.

And all this the grass does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at
the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of grass
is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and
completion. He proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut the
coming grass-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mere
leaf--the blade--to perfect itself. He will not have it a "blade" at
all; he cuts its top away as never sword or sabre was shaped. All the
beauty of a blade of grass is that the organic shape has the intention of
ending in a point. Surely no one at all aware of the beauty of lines
ought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of manifest intention,
which rules a living line from its beginning, even though the intention
be towards a point while the first spring of the line is towards an
opening curve. But man does not care for intention; he mows it. Nor
does he care for attitude; he rolls it. In a word, he proves to the
grass, as plainly as deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind. The
rolling, especially, seems to be a violent way of showing that the
universal grass interrupted by the life of the Englishman is not as he
would have it. Besides, when he wishes to deride a city, he calls it
grass-grown.

But his suburbs shall not, if he can help it, be grass-grown. They shall
not be like a mere Pisa. Highgate shall not so, nor Peckham.

A WOMAN IN GREY

The mothers of Professors were indulged in the practice of jumping at
conclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process of
reason.

Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though they
accumulated generation by generation upon women, and passed over their
sons. Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process other
than the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers and
grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers. This, for
instance, was written l