have to write of me. How can I write of myself? This I will say:
that I think that I am a sheep whose fate it is to leave a little of
his wool on every bramble.
I sail next week for England to make my visit to Mr. Blackthorne--at
last. Another letter has come from him. He has thrown himself into
the generous work of seeing that my visit to him shall make me known.
He tells me there will be a house party, a week-end; some of the
great critics will be there, some writers. "You must be found out in
England widely and at once," he writes.
My heart swells as one who feels himself climbing toward a height.
There is kindled in me that strangest of all the flames that burn in
the human heart, the shining thought that my life is destined to be
more than mine, that my work will make its way into other minds and
mingle with the better, happier impulses of other lives.
The ironic ferns have had their way with us. But after all has it
not been for the best? Have they not even in their irony been the
emblems of fidelity?
They have found us out, they have played upon our weaknesses, they
have exaggerated our virtues until these became vices, they have
separated us and set us going our diverging ways.
But while we human beings are moving in every direction over the
earth, the earth without our being conscious of it is carrying us in
one same direction. So as we follow the different pathways of our
lives which appear to lead toward unfaithfulness to one another, may
it not be true that to the Power which sets us all in motion and
drives us whither it will all our lives are the Emblems of Fidelity?
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Emblems of Fidelity, by James Lane Allen