When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at length finished she and her mother went to see it.  The artist put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face expressing displeasure, and said not one word.  Nor did the artist open his lips.  And at last the girl, to break the uncomfortable silence, said, “Where shall we hang it, mother?” and the lady replied, “Just where you like, my dear, so long as you hang it with the face to the wall.”  It was an insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for the work.  She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he never saw her again.  And now Time, the humbler of proud beautiful women, had given him his revenge:  the portrait, scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and had caused her to weep at the change in herself.

To return.  One wishes in these moments of meeting, of surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have more balm than bitterness in it.  “Grieve not, dear friend of old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all —­the idea that those we have not looked on this long time —­full five years, let us say—­have remained as they were while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in that path in which our feet are set.  No one, however hardened he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now the illusion I cherished has gone—­now I have seen with my physical eyes, and a new image, with Time’s writing on it, has taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have it otherwise.  No, not if I could would I call back the vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we cannot find a permanent resting-place.”

Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were born into this mutable world.  After all, it is because of the losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet to us.  The thought is in Cory’s Mimnernus in Church: 

   All beauteous things for which we live
   By laws of time and space decay. 
   But oh, the very reason why
   I clasp them is because they die.