On this particular occasion she kept me waiting for a few minutes, and then darted into the room with an eager apology.  She had just had, she said, very bad news.  Her second son, a soldier in India, had died suddenly of fever, and the news had reached her only that morning.  She is a devoted mother, and she wept frankly and unashamedly as she told me the sad details.  Her grief was evidently deep and profound; and yet, strange to say, I found myself realising that this event, entailing peculiarly tragic consequences which I need not here define, was to the gallant old lady, in spite of, or rather in consequence of, her grief, a thing which heightened the values of existence, put a fire into her pulses, and quickened the sense of living.  It was not that she did not feel the loss; she suffered acutely; but for all that, it was an experience of a stirring kind, and her indomitable appetite for sensation was fed and sustained by it.  She was full of schemes for the widow and children; she was melted with heart-felt grief for them; but I perceived that she was in no way dejected by the experience; it called all her powers, even the power of bearing grief, into play; and the draining of the bitter cup was more congenial to her than inactive monotony.  It gave me a strong sense of her vitality, and I felt that it was a really splendid thing to be able to approach a grief with this fiery zest, rather than to collapse into a dreary and hysterical depression.  There were fifty things she could do, and she meant to do them every one, and secretly exulted in the task.  It was even, I felt, a distinct pleasure to her to describe the melancholy circumstances of the event in the fullest detail.  It was not a pensive or luxurious emotion, but a tumult of vehement feeling, bearing the bark of the soul triumphantly along.  She would have been distressed and even indignant if I had revealed my thoughts; but the fact was there for all that; instead of brooding or fretting over small affairs, she was face to face with one of the great unanswerable, unfathomable facts of life, and her spirit drank in the solemnity, the greatness of it, as a flower after a drought drinks in the steady plunging rain.

I will not say that this is the secret of life; for it is a faculty of temperament, and cannot be acquired.  But I reflected how much finer and stronger it was than my own tendency to be bewildered and cowed beneath a robust stroke of fate.  I felt that the thing one ought to aim at doing was to look experience steadily in the face, whether sweet or bitter, to interrogate it firmly, to grasp its significance.  If one cowers away from it, if one tries to distract and beguile the soul, to forget the grief in feverish activity, well, one may succeed in dulling the pain as by some drug or anodyne; but the lesson of life is thereby deferred.  Why should one so faint-heartedly persist in making choice of experiences, in welcoming what is pleasant, what feeds our vanity and self-satisfaction,