have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.

Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le
jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as
their mother.

And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture
them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the
same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well
I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience,
all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief,
ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should
have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and
thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity,
which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am
(though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!

Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed
flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit
of life, never, never, never!

Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was
an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence,
except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and
a Prince Charming were watching over them.

All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the
more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not
only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us
both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love