the lamplight. The rustle of the leaves had an expostulatory sound. The
wan poplars down the meadow looked accusing. It was almost as if the
freemasonry of the green world was up in arms for Hazel. She had its
blood in her veins, and shared with it the silent worship of freedom
and beauty, and had now been plunged so deeply into human life that she
was lost to it. It was as if every incarnation of perfection that she
had seen in leaf and flower (and she had seen much, though remaining
without expression of it), every moment of deep comradeship with
earthy, dewy things, every illumined memory of colours and lights that
her vivid mind had gathered and cherished in its rage of love and
rapture, had come now, pacing disdainfully through this old haunt
of crude humanity; passing up the stairs; standing about the great
four-poster where so many Reddins had died and been born; gazing upon
this face that had known dreams (however childish) of their eternal
magic; grieving as the tree for the leaf that has fallen. They grieved,
but they did not forgive. For the spirits of beauty and magic are
(as the bondsman of colour knows and the bondsman of poetry) inimical
to the ordinary life and destiny of man. They break up homes. They lead
a thousand wanderers into the unknown. They brook no half service.

It is only the rarest exception when a man loves a woman and yet excels
in his art, and a woman must have an amazing genius if she is still a
poet after childbirth.

But though sometimes these proud spirits will tolerate, will even be
sworn companions of human love, it is only when it is a passion pure
and burning that they know it for a sister spirit. In the sexual
meeting of Hazel and Reddin there was nothing of this. Though it
brought out the best in Reddin, the best was so very poor. And Hazel
was merely passive.