"Oh, I was foolish to quote those lines on a Scotch burn to you,
knowing how you would take such a thing up! For you are the very soul
of sadness - a sadness that is like a cruelty - and for all your love, my
sister, you would have killed me with your sadness had I not refused to
listen so many many times!"
"No! No! No! Listen now to what I had to say without interrupting me
again: All this about the villages, viewed from up there where the lark
sings, is but a preliminary - a little play to deceive yourself and me.
For, all the time you are thinking of other things, serious and some
exceedingly sad - of those who live not in villages but in dreadful
cities, who are like motherless men who have never known a mother's
love and have never had a home on earth. And you are like one who has
come upon a cornfield, ripe for the harvest with you alone to reap it.
And viewing it you pluck an ear of corn, and rub the grains out in the
palm of your hand, and toss them up, laughing and playing with them
like a child, pretending you are thinking of nothing, yet all the time
thinking - thinking of the task before you. And presently you will take
to the reaping and reap until the sun goes down, to begin again at
sunrise to toil and sweat again until evening. Then, lifting your bent
body with pain and difficulty, you will look to see how little you have
done, and that the field has widened and now stretches away before you
to the far horizon. And in despair you will cast the sickle away and
abandon the task."
"What then, O wise sister, would you have me do?"
"Leave it now, and save yourself this fresh disaster and suffering."
"So be it! I cannot but remember that there have been many disasters -
more than can be counted on the fingers of my two hands - which I would
have saved myself if I had listened when I turned a deaf ear to you.
But tell me, do you mind just a little more innocent play on my part -
just a little picture of, say, one of the villages viewed a while ago
from under the cloud - or perhaps two?"
And Psyche, my sister, having won her point and pacified me, and
conquered my scruples and gloom, and seeing me now submissive, smiled a
gracious consent.
XIII
HER OWN VILLAGE
One afternoon when cycling among the limestone hills of Derbyshire I
came to an unlovely dreary-looking little village named Chilmorton. It
was an exceptionally hot June day and I was consumed with thirst: never
had I wanted tea so badly.
