Only, as says the poet in words of truth and beauty:
"Only but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear;
When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again--
And what we mean we say and what we would we know.
* * * * *
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose
And the sea whereunto it goes."
Some such Indian summer of delight and forgetfulness of trouble, and
the tragic condition of our days, was now opening to Harold Quaritch
and Ida de la Molle. Every day, or almost every day, they met and went
upon their painting expeditions and argued the point of the validity
or otherwise of the impressionist doctrines of art. Not that of all
this painting came anything very wonderful, although in the evening
the Colonel would take out his canvases and contemplate their rigid
proportions with singular pride and satisfaction. It was a little
weakness of his to think that he could paint, and one of which he was
somewhat tenacious. Like many another man he could do a number of
things exceedingly well and one thing very badly, and yet had more
faith in that bad thing than in all the good.
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