Danyers felt that in talking of these things she was no mere echo of
Rendle's thought. If her identity had appeared to be merged in his it was
because they thought alike, not because he had thought for her. Posterity
is apt to regard the women whom poets have sung as chance pegs on which
they hung their garlands; but Mrs. Anerton's mind was like some fertile
garden wherein, inevitably, Rendle's imagination had rooted itself and
flowered. Danyers began to see how many threads of his complex mental
tissue the poet had owed to the blending of her temperament with his; in a
certain sense Silvia had herself created the _Sonnets to Silvia_.

To be the custodian of Rendle's inner self, the door, as it were, to the
sanctuary, had at first seemed to Danyers so comprehensive a privilege
that he had the sense, as his friendship with Mrs. Anerton advanced, of
forcing his way into a life already crowded. What room was there, among
such towering memories, for so small an actuality as his? Quite suddenly,
after this, he discovered that Mrs. Memorall knew better: his fortunate
friend was bored as well as lonely.

"You have had more than any other woman!" he had exclaimed to her one day;
and her smile flashed a derisive light on his blunder. Fool that he was,
not to have seen that she had not had enough! That she was young still--do
years count?--tender, human, a woman; that the living have need of the
living.

After that, when they climbed the alleys of the hanging park, resting in
one of the little ruined temples, or watching, through a ripple of
foliage, the remote blue flash of the lake, they did not always talk of
Rendle or of literature. She encouraged Danyers to speak of himself; to
confide his ambitions to her; she asked him the questions which are the
wise woman's substitute for advice.