The tears lay mute on her eyes. She rose quickly and walked away to the
garden. He followed her. When they had entered it, he strolled beside her
among the plants.
"You must see them once more," she said. Her tone was perfectly quiet and
careless. Then she continued with animation:
"Some day you will not know this garden. When we are richer, you will see
what I shall do: with it, with the house, with everything! I do not live
altogether on memories: I have hopes."
They came to the bench where they were used to talk, She sat down, and
waited until she could control the least tremor of her voice. Then she
turned upon him her noble eyes, the exquisite passionate tender light of
which no effort of the will could curtain in. Nor could any self-restraint
turn aside the electrical energy of her words:"I thought I should not let
you go away without saying something more to you about what has happened
lately with Amy. My interest in you, your future, your success, has caused
me to feel everything more than you can possibly realize. But I am not
thinking of this now: it is nothing, it will pass. What it has caused me to
see and to regret more than anything else is the power that life will have
to hurt you on account of the ideals that you have built up in secret. We
have been talking about Sir Thomas Malory and chivalry and ideals: there is
one thing you need to know--all of us need to know it--and to know it
well."Ideals are of two kinds. There are those that correspond to our
highest sense of perfection. They express what we might be were life, the
world, ourselves, all different, all better. Let these be high as they may!
They are not useless because unattainable. Life is not a failure because
they are never attained. God Himself requires of us the unattainable: 'Be ye
perfect, even as I am perfect! He could not do less. He commands perfection,
He forgives us that we are not perfect! Nor does He count us failures
because we have to be forgiven. Our ideals also demand of us perfection--the
impossible; but because we come far short of this we have no right to count
ourselves as failures. What are they like--ideals such as these? They are
like light-houses. But light-houses are not made to live in; neither can we
live in such ideals. I suppose they are meant to shine on us from afar, when
the sea of our life is dark and stormy, perhaps to remind us of a haven of
hope, as we drift or sink in shipwreck. All of your ideals are lighthouses.
"But there are ideals of another sort; it is these that you lack. As we
advance into life, out of larger experience of the world and of ourselves,
are unfolded the ideals of what will be possible to us if we make the best
use of the world and of ourselves, taken as we are. Let these be as high as
they may, they will always be lower than those others which are perhaps the
veiled intimations of our immortality. These will always be imperfect; but
life is not a failure because they are so. It is these that are to burn for
us, not like light-houses in the distance, but like candles in our hands.
For so many of us they are too much like candles!--the longer they burn, the
lower they burn, until before death they go out altogether! But I know that
it will not be thus with you. At first you will have disappoint-ments and
sufferings--the world on one side, unattainable ideals of perfection on the
other. But by degrees the comforting light of what you may actually do and
be in an imperfect world will shine close to you and all around you, more
and more. It is this that will lead you never to perfection, but always
toward it."