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Teresa could hardly be said to take a pleasure in the view and its flowery foreground—indeed, like all lovely and complicated things, they teased her exceedingly; because the infinite variety which made up their whole defied expression. Until the invention of some machine, she was thinking, shows to literature what are its natural limits (as the camera and cinema have shown to painting) by expressing, in some unknown medium, say a spring wood in toto—appearance, smells, noises, associations—which will far outstrip in exact representation the combined qualities of Mozart, Spencer, Corot, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and yet remain dead and flat and vulgar,—so long shall we be teased by the importunities of detail and forget that such things as spring woods are best expressed lightly, delicately, in a little song, thus:

The grove are all a pale, frail mist,

The new year sucks the sun;

Of all the kisses that we kissed

Now which shall be the one?

As she murmured the lines below her breath, two children came running down the grass path that divided the herbaceous border—Anna and Jasper Sinclair, the grandchildren of the house.