She leaned back, but she went on interfering with it in terms of
sincerest enthusiasm.

When we stopped at the great archway of entrance I begged to be left
in the carriage. What else could one do, when the golden moment had
come, but sit in the carriage and measure it? They climbed the
broad stone steps together and passed under the lofty gravures into
the garden, and I waited. I waited and remembered. I am not, as
perhaps by this time is evident, a person of overwhelming sentiment,
but I think the smile upon my lips was gentle. So plainly I could
see, beyond the massive archway and across a score of years, all
that they saw at that moment--Arjamand's garden, and the long
straight tank of marble cleaving it full of sleeping water and the
shadows of the marshaling cypresses; her wide dark garden of roses
and of pomegranates, and at the end the Vision, marvellous, aerial,
the soul of something--is it beauty? is it sorrow?--that great white
pride of love in mourning such as only here in all the round of our
little world lifts itself to the stars, the unpaintable,
indescribable Taj Mahal. A gentle breath stole out with a scent of
jessamine and such a memory! I closed my eyes and felt the warm
luxury of a tear.

Thinking of the two in the garden, my mood was very kind, very
conniving. How foolish after all were my cherry-stone theories of
taste and temperament before that uncalculating thing which sways a
world and builds a Taj Mahal! Was it probable that Arjamand and her
Emperor had loved fastidiously, and yet how they had loved! I
wandered away into consideration of the blind forces which move the
world, in which comely young persons like my daughter Cecily had
such a place; I speculated vaguely upon the value of the subtler