Not
these! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow
are beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red peony just
opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on the white foam, youth not
yet faded but already fading, joy with its finger on his lips, bidding
adieu.
"And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life's
tragedy. And to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: _I want to be
told_."
"If you can be told, you shall be told," he said.
She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and
composure. Then she began:
"Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college
friend. You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and
celebrated the German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to
have the Christmas Tree in our house--through memory of him and of
those years. You have often described to me how you and he in summer
went Alpine climbing, and far up in some green valley girdled with
glaciers lay of afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drowsing
in the crystalline air. You told me of your nights of wandering down
the Rhine together when the heart turns so intimately to the heart
beside it. He was German youth and song and dream and happiness to
you.
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