TIME PASSES

dreams persisted, and it was impossible to
strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree,
man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed
to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw)
that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order
rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to
range hither and thither in search of some absolute
good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the
known pleasures and familiar virtues, something
alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard,
bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would
render the possessor secure. Moreover, softened
and acquiescent, the spring with her bees hum-
ming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about
her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among
passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed
to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows
of mankind.

[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness
connected with childbirth, which was indeed a
tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved
happiness more.]

And now in the heat of summer the wind sent
its spies about the house again. Flies wove a web
in the sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close
to the glass in the night tapped methodically at
the window pane. When darkness fell, the stroke
of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such

205