"There you are wrong again. I think you are quite capable of appreciating
him. But you cannot appreciate what you have never seen. You think of him
as dry, and think you ought to be able to like dry things. Now he is not
dry, and you ought not to be able to like dry things. You have a figure
before you in your fancy, which is dry, and which you call Milton. But it
is no more Milton than your dull-faced Dutch doll, which you called after
her, was your merry Aunt Judy. But here comes your mamma; and I haven't
said what I wanted to say yet."

"But surely, husband, you can say it all the same," said my wife. "I will
go away if you can't."

"I can say it all the better, my love. Come and sit down here beside me. I
was trying to show Connie--"

"You did show me, papa."

"Well, I was showing Connie that a gift has sometimes to be taken away
again before we can know what it is worth, and so receive it right."

Ethelwyn sighed. She was always more open to the mournful than the glad.
Her heart had been dreadfully wrung in her youth.

"And I was going on to give her the greatest instance of it in human
history. As long as our Lord was with his disciples, they could not see
him right: he was too near them. Too much light, too many words, too much
revelation, blinds or stupefies. The Lord had been with them long enough.
They loved him dearly, and yet often forgot his words almost as soon as he
said them. He could not get it into them, for instance, that he had not
come to be a king. Whatever he said, they shaped it over again after their