“The darker, vaguer phases of beauty,” he said to Eileen, smiling, “attract and fascinate those young in experience.  Tragedy is always better appreciated and better rendered by those who have never lived it.  The anatomy of sadness, the subtler fascination of life brooding in shadow, appeals most keenly to those who can study and reflect, then dismiss it all and return again to the brightness of existence which has not yet for them been tarnished.”

He had never before, even by slightest implication, referred to his own experience with life.  She was not perfectly certain that he did so now.

They were standing on one of the treeless hills—­a riotous tangle of grasses and wild flowers—­looking out to sea across Sky Pond.  He had a rod; and as he stood he idly switched the gaily coloured flies backward and forward.

“My tastes,” he said, still smiling, “incline me to the garishly sunlit side of this planet.”  And, to tease her and arouse her to combat:  “I prefer a farandole to a nocturne; I’d rather have a painting than an etching; Mr. Whistler bores me with his monochromatic mud; I don’t like dull colours, dull sounds, dull intellects; and anything called ’an arrangement’ on canvas, or anything called ‘a human document’ or ’an appreciation’ in literature, or anything ‘precious’ in art, or any author who ‘weaves’ instead of writes his stories—­all these irritate me when they do not first bore me to the verge of anaesthesia.”

He switched his trout-flies defiantly, hopeful of an indignant retort from her; but she only laughed and glanced at him, and shook her pretty head.

“There’s just enough truth in what you say to make a dispute quite profitless.  Besides, I don’t feel like single combat; I’m too glad to have you here.”

Standing there—­fairly swimming—­in the delicious upper-air currents, she looked blissfully across the rolling moors, while the sunlight drenched her and the salt wind winnowed the ruddy glory of her hair, and from the tangle of tender blossoming green things a perfume mounted, saturating her senses as she breathed it deeper in the happiness of desire fulfilled and content quite absolute.

“After all,” she said, “what more is there than this?  Earth and sea and sky and sun, and a friend to show them to. . . .  Because, as I wrote you, the friend is quite necessary in the scheme of things—­to round out the symmetry of it all. . . .  I suppose you’re dying to dangle those flies in Brier Water to see whether there are any trout there.  Well, there are; Austin stocked it years ago, and he never fishes, so no doubt it’s full of fish. . . .  What is that black thing moving along the edge of the Golden Marsh?”

“A mink,” he said, looking.

She seated herself cross-legged on the hill-top to watch the mink at her leisure.  But the lithe furry creature took to the water, dived, and vanished, and she turned her attention to the landscape.